The e-Index, Complementing the h-Index for Excess Citations

By Chun-Ting Zhang. PLoS ONE, 2009

455 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Background The h-index has already been used by major citation databases to evaluate the academic performance of individual scientists. Although effective and simple, the h-index suffers from some drawbacks that limit its use in accurately and fairly comparing the scientific output of different researchers. These drawbacks include information loss and low resolution: the former refers to the fact that in addition to h 2 citations for papers in the h-core, excess citations are completely ignored, whereas the latter means that it is common for a group of researchers to have an identical h-index. Methodology/Principal Findings To solve these problems, I here propose the e-index, where e 2 represents the ignored excess citations, in addition to the h 2 citations for h-core papers. Citation information can be completely depicted by using the h-index together with the e-index, which are independent of each other. Some other h-type indices, such as a and R, are h-dependent, have information redundancy with h, and therefore, when used together with h, mask the real differences in excess citations of different researchers. Conclusions/Significance Although simple, the e-index is a necessary h-index complement, especially for evaluating highly cited scientists or for precisely comparing the scientific output of a group of scientists having an identical h-index.

Subfields: Information Systems, Information Systems and Management, Statistics and Probability

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/095699586b804a8d8c5edf42eb12d863bd42056c

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In Information Systems

  1. John C. Mingers
  2. Loet Leydesdorff
  3. Ismael Rafols
  4. Chaomei Chen
  5. Ludo Waltman
  6. Saif M. Mohammad
  7. José M. Merigó
  8. Jianbo Yang

In Information Systems and Management

  1. Loet Leydesdorff
  2. John C. Mingers

In Statistics and Probability

  1. John C. Mingers
  2. Loet Leydesdorff
  3. Chaomei Chen
  4. Ismael Rafols
  5. Judit Bar-Ilan
  6. Saif M. Mohammad
  7. José M. Merigó
  8. Jianbo Yang

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