Scientometrics

, Volume 98, Issue 2, pp 1021–1031 | Cite as

The H l -index: improvement of H-index based on quality of citing papers

Article
First Online:
Received:

Abstract

This paper proposes h l -index as an improvement of the h-index, a popular measurement for the research quality of academic researchers. Although the h-index integrates the number of publications and the academic impact of each publication to evaluate the productivity of a researcher, it assumes that all papers that cite an academic article contribute equally to the academic impact of this article. This assumption, of course, could not be true in most times. The citation from a well-cited paper certainly brings more attention to the article than the citation from a paper that people do not pay attention to. It therefore becomes important to integrate the impact of papers that cite a researcher’s work into the evaluation of the productivity of the researcher. Constructing a citation network among academic papers, this paper therefore proposes h l -index that integrating the h-index with the concept of lobby index, a measures that has been used to evaluate the impact of a node in a complex network based on the impact of other nodes that the focal node has direct link with. This paper also explores the characteristics of the proposed h l -index by comparing it with citations, h-index and its variant g-index.

Keywords

H-index Lobby index Academic influence 
This is a preview of subscription content, log in to check access.

Notes

Acknowledgments

This work is partly supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of PRC (Nos. 71171067, 70890082) and Postdoctoral Science-research Developmental Foundation of Heilongjiang province (No. LBH-Q11114).

References

  1. Alonso, S., Cabrerizo, F. J., Herrera-Viedma, E., & Herrera, F. (2009). H-index: A review focused in its variants, computation and standardization for different scientific fields. Journal of Informetrics, 3(4), 273–289.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  2. Alonso, S., Cabrerizo, F. J., Herrera-Viedma, E., & Herrera, F. (2010). H g-index: A new index to characterize the scientific output of researchers based on the h- and g-indices. Scientometrics, 82(2), 391–400.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  3. Barabási, A. L., & Albert, R. (1999). Emergence of scaling in random networks. Science, 5439(286), 509–512.Google Scholar
  4. Barcza, K., & Telcs, A. (2009). Paretian publication patterns imply paretian hirsch index. Scientometrics, 81(2), 513–519.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  5. Batista, P. D., Campiteli, M. G., & Kinouchi, O. (2006). Is it possible to compare researchers with different scientific interests? Scientometrics, 68(1), 179–189.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  6. Bonacich, P. (1972). Factoring and weighting approaches to status scores and clique identification. Journal of Mathematical Sociology, 2(1), 113–120.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  7. Bornmann, L., & Daniel, H. D. (2007). What do we know about the h index? Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 58(9), 1381–1385. doi: 10.1002/asi.20609.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  8. Bornmann, L., Mutz, R., & Daniel, H. D. (2008). Are there better indices for evaluation purposes than the h-index? A comparison of nine different variants of the h-index using data from biomedicine. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 59(5), 830–837.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  9. Egghe, L. (2006). Theory and practise of the g-index. Scientometrics, 69(1), 131–152.CrossRefMathSciNetGoogle Scholar
  10. Egghe, L. (2010). Influence of adding or deleting items and sources on the H-index. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 61(2), 370–373. doi: 10.1002/asi.21239.Google Scholar
  11. Egghe, L., & Rousseau, R. (2006). An informetric model for the Hirsch-index. Scientometrics, 69(1), 121–129.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  12. Glänzel, W. (2006). On the h-index—A mathematical approach to a new measure of publication activity and citation impact. Scientometrics, 67(2), 315–321.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  13. Hirsch, J. E. (2005). An index to quantify an individual’s scientific research output. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of America, 102(46), 16569–16572.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  14. Jin, B. H. (2007). The AR-index: Complementing the h-index. ISSI Newsletter, 3(1), 6.Google Scholar
  15. Jin, B. H., Liang, L. M., Rousseau, R., & Egghe, L. (2007). The R and AR indices: Complementing the h-index. Chinese Science Bulletin, 52(6), 855–863.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  16. Katz, L. (1953). A new status index derived from sociometric analysis. Psychomatrika, 18(1), 39–43.CrossRefMATHGoogle Scholar
  17. Kelly, C. D., & Jennions, M. D. (2006). The h index and career assessment by numbers. Trends in Ecology & Evolution, 21(4), 167–170.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  18. Korn, A., Schubert, A., & Telcs, A. (2009). Lobby index in networks. Physica A, 388(11), 2221–2226.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  19. Kosmulski, M. (2006). A new Hirsch-type index saves time and works equally well as the original h-index. ISSI Newsletter, 2(3), 4–6.Google Scholar
  20. Liu, Y. X., & Rousseau, R. (2008). Properties of Hirsch-type indices: The case of library classification categories. Scientometrics, 79(2), 235–248.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  21. Rousseau, R., & Jin, B. H. (2008). The age-dependent h-type AR(2)-index: Basic properties and a case study. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 59(14), 2305–2311. doi: 10.1002/asi.20928.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  22. Schubert, A., & Glänzel, W. (2007). A systematic analysis of Hirsch-type indices for journals. Journal of Informetrics, 1(3), 179–184.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  23. Yan, X. B., Zhai, L., & Fan, W. G. (2013). C-index: A weighted network node centrality measure for collaboration competence. Journal of Informetrics, 7(1), 223–239. doi: 10.1016/j.joi.2012.11.004.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  24. Ye, F. Y. (2011). A unification of three models for the h-index. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 62(1), 205–207.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  25. Yuan, J. P. (2010). Scientometrics advanced course. Shanghai: Science and Technology Literature Press of China.Google Scholar

Copyright information

© Akadémiai Kiadó, Budapest, Hungary 2013

Authors and Affiliations

  1. 1.School of ManagementHarbin Institute of TechnologyHarbinChina
  2. 2.School of Applied ScienceHarbin University of Science and TechnologyHarbinChina
  3. 3.College of BusinessOregon State UniversityCorvallisUSA

Personalised recommendations