Universality of scholarly impact metrics

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new method to evaluate the universality of scholarly impact metrics and proposes a simple, universal metric, hs, enabling cross-disciplinary comparisons of scientific impact.

Contribution

It presents a novel approach to assess whether impact metrics are truly universal and introduces the hs metric as a universal measure.

Findings

The new assessment method effectively evaluates metric universality.

The hs metric is shown to be universal across disciplines.

The study advances formal methods for measuring scholarly impact.

Abstract

Given the growing use of impact metrics in the evaluation of scholars, journals, academic institutions, and even countries, there is a critical need for means to compare scientific impact across disciplinary boundaries. Unfortunately, citation-based metrics are strongly biased by diverse field sizes and publication and citation practices. As a result, we have witnessed an explosion in the number of newly proposed metrics that claim to be "universal." However, there is currently no way to objectively assess whether a normalized metric can actually compensate for disciplinary bias. We introduce a new method to assess the universality of any scholarly impact metric, and apply it to evaluate a number of established metrics. We also define a very simple new metric hs, which proves to be universal, thus allowing to compare the impact of scholars across scientific disciplines. These results move us closer to a formal methodology in the measure of scholarly impact.