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Evaluation of h-index and its citation intensity based variants in the field of mathematics

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Abstract

Assessing and evaluating the academic impact and its results produced by researchers is necessary to promote the academic progress. A diverse and varied set of parameters have been proposed by the scientific community to find the most influential researchers, including citation count, the total number of publications, hybrid approaches, h-index, extensions and variants of h-index. Current state-of-the-art depicts that there is no standard benchmark available to determine the optimum parameter to find the most influential author of a specific domain. Furthermore, it has been observed that such indices are assessed on a small dataset and ingenious scenarios. The small dataset can never truly help to analyze the nature of these indices and it is very difficult to determine the significance and influence of every index over the others. Hence, it’s necessary to assess them on a large dataset. The following research would help in scrutinizing the h-index along with its citation intensity based variants to rank the authors by using a large dataset of Mathematics domain that consist of 57,533 authors and 62,033 total numbers of publications. These indices make use of the total published papers, citation count, along with the h-index and the five of its citation intensity based variants. The esteemed awards that are won nationally and internationally in the field of mathematics serve as a benchmark. This study would deal and help to recognize the most influential authors by concluding the results gained after evaluation of these indices. For this purpose, firstly, we calculated the correlation among different indices. The strong correlation was found between the h-index and its five citation intensity based variants. The occurrence of the award winners is examined according to the rank lists. H-index brought around 30.88% awardees in the top 10% of the ranked list. In a bird’s eye view, no index could succeed in elevating a 50% of award winners in the top-ranking. Our benchmark dataset is composed of 68 awardees. In the ranking lists, the maximum number of awardees belongs to American Mathematics Society (AMS) which are 29.

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Notes

  1. https://www.mathunion.org/.

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Funding

Funding was provided by Capital University of Science and Technology.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, Capital University of Science and Technology, Islamabad, Pakistan

    Qurat-ul Ain, Hira Riaz & Muhammad Tanvir Afzal

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  1. Qurat-ul Ain
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  2. Hira Riaz
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  3. Muhammad Tanvir Afzal
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Correspondence to Muhammad Tanvir Afzal.

Appendix

Appendix

See Table 3.

Table 3 Indices and their definition/formula
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Ain, Qu., Riaz, H. & Afzal, M.T. Evaluation of h-index and its citation intensity based variants in the field of mathematics. Scientometrics 119, 187–211 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-019-03009-y

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