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Impact of h-index on author’s rankings: an improvement to the h-index for lower-ranked authors

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Abstract

In academia, the research performance of a faculty is evaluated based on the number of publications, the number of citations, and the impact of publication where one publishes. Most of the time h-index is widely used during the hiring process or the faculty performance evaluation. However, there is a significant impact of varying h-index among different databases on the author’s research evaluation. Here we analyze the publication records of 385 authors from Monash University (Australia) to investigate (i) the impact of different databases like Scopus and Web of Science on the ranking of authors within a discipline, and (ii) to complement the h-index, named \(h_{\text {c}}\), by adding the weight of the highest cited paper to the h-index of the authors. The results show the positive impact of \(h_{\text {c}}\) on the lower-ranked authors (\(h \le 10\)) in every discipline.

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Data availability

The datasets generated during and/or analysed during the current study along with python codes are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

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Acknowledgements

Both Scopus and WoS data is downloaded from the Northwestern University, USA. We thank Dr. Hirdesh K. Pharasi for his suggestions. We are thankful to both the reviewers and editor for their invaluable suggestions.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Computer Applications, Lovely Professional University, Phagwara, Punjab, 144401, India

    Parul Khurana

  2. School of Engineering and Technology, BML Munjal University, Gurugram, Haryana, 122413, India

    Kiran Sharma

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  1. Parul Khurana
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Correspondence to Kiran Sharma.

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Khurana, P., Sharma, K. Impact of h-index on author’s rankings: an improvement to the h-index for lower-ranked authors. Scientometrics 127, 4483–4498 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-022-04464-w

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-022-04464-w

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