A variant of the h-index to measure recent performance

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new variant of the h-index that focuses solely on recent publications to better predict future scientific achievements and aid in academic decision-making.

Contribution

A novel h-index variant that considers only recent publications, improving its relevance for predicting future performance and decision-making.

Findings

The new index emphasizes recent work for better prediction.

It can be easily calculated from existing citation databases.

It is more useful for hiring and resource allocation decisions.

Abstract

The predictive power of the h-index has been shown to depend for a long time on citations to rather old publications. This has raised doubts about its usefulness for predicting future scientific achievements. Here I investigate a variant which considers only the recent publications and is therefore more useful in academic hiring processes and for the allocation of research resources. It is simply defined in analogy to the usual h-index, but taking into account only the publications from recent years, and it can easily be determined from the ISI Web of Knowledge.