New Index for Quantifying an Individual's Scientific Research Output

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new index that evaluates individual researchers' scientific impact by considering single-author papers and citations, improving upon the traditional h-index to better reflect quality and originality.

Contribution

A novel index combining single-author publications and citations to more accurately assess research quality and distinguish innovative authors from those with multi-author citation gains.

Findings

The new index reduces inflated h-indices caused by multi-author citations.

It emphasizes the importance of single-author work in research impact.

Examples demonstrate larger differences between h-index and the new index for certain researchers.

Abstract

Classifying researchers according to the quality of their published work rather than the quantity is a curtail issue. We attempt to introduce a new formula of the percentage range to be used for evaluating qualitatively the researchers' production. The suggested equation depends on the number of the single-author published papers and their citations to be added as a new factor to the known h-index. These factors give an advantage and make a clear evidence of innovative authors and reduce the known h-index for authors who are gaining citations by adding their names to multi-author papers. It is shown that various dimensions of ethical integrity and originality will be effective in this new index. An important scenario arising from the analysis is shown in terms of examples. It refers to larger differences between the h- and the new index which comes from the whole work and the one comes from the single-author papers only, is shown.