EM and EM'-index sequence: Construction and application in scientific assessment of scholars

TL;DR

This paper introduces EM and EM'-index sequences as new scientometric metrics to better assess scholars' yearly impact and productivity, addressing limitations of traditional citation-based indicators.

Contribution

It proposes EM and EM'-index sequences, providing a novel approach for temporal and comparative assessment of scholars' scientific impact.

Findings

EM and EM'-index sequences effectively measure yearly scholarly impact.

Empirical analysis on 89 scholars demonstrates their usefulness.

These indices offer an alternative to traditional metrics for scientific assessment.

Abstract

Most of the scientometric indicators use only the total number of citations of an article and produce a single number for scientific assessment of scholars. Although this concept is very simple to compute, it fails to show the scientific productivity and impact of scholars during a time-span or in a year. To overcome this, several time series indicators have been proposed that consider the citations from the entire research career of a scholar. However, these indicators fail to give a comparative assessment of two scholars having same or very similar index value. To overcome this shortcoming, h-index sequence was proposed to assess the impact of scholars during a particular time-span and to compare multiple scholars at a similar stage in their careers. The h-index sequence is based on the h-index formulation. One of the main issues related to the h-index is that it completely ignores the excess citation in scientific assessment; h-index sequence also exhibits a similar behaviour. To overcome these limitations, in this article, we have discussed the EM and $EM^{'}$-index sequence, and performed an empirical study based on yearly citation count earned from all publications of 89 scholars' publication data. The element of the EM and $EM^{'}$-index sequence for a given year shows the impact of a scholar for that year. We conclude that the EM and $EM^{'}$-index sequence could be used as an alternative metrics to asses the impact of scholars.