h-index and its alternative: A Review

TL;DR

This review paper discusses the h-index and various alternative scientometric indicators, analyzing their advantages and limitations in evaluating individual and group scientific impact across multiple categories.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive categorization and comparison of existing scientometric indicators, highlighting their strengths and weaknesses.

Findings

H-index is widely used but has limitations.

Multiple alternative indicators have been proposed to address these shortcomings.

The paper categorizes and reviews these indicators comprehensively.

Abstract

In recent years, several Scientometrics and Bibliometrics indicators were proposed to evaluate the scientific impact of individuals, institutions, colleges, universities and research teams. The h-index gives a major breakthrough in the research community to evaluate the scientific impact of an individual. It got a lot of attention due to its simplicity and several other indicators were proposed to extend the properties of h-index as well as to overcome shortcomings of h-index. In this literature review, we have discussed the advantages and limitations of almost all Scientometrics as well as Bibliometrics indicators which have been categorized into seven categories :(i) Complement of h-index, (ii) Based on total number of authors, (iii) Based on publication age, (iv) Combination of two indices, (v) Based on excess citation count, (vi) Based on total publication count, (vii) Based on other variants. The main objective of this article is to study all those indicators which have been proposed to evaluate the scientific impact of an individual researcher or a group of researchers.