The h-index and the Harmonic Mean

TL;DR

This paper proposes using the harmonic mean of publication count and citations per paper as a new single-value metric for research output, comparing it to the established h-index.

Contribution

It introduces a novel index based on the harmonic mean and evaluates its performance against the h-index.

Findings

Harmonic mean index offers an alternative to the h-index.

Comparison shows differences in ranking researchers.

Potential advantages in certain research assessment scenarios.

Abstract

The Harmonic Mean between the number of papers and the citation number per paper is proposed as a simple single-value index to quantify an individual's research output. Two simple comparisons with the Hirsch h-index are performed.