Abstract
The concept of h-index has been proposed to easily assess a researcher’s performance with a single number. However, by using only this number, we lose significant information about the distribution of citations per article in an author’s publication list. In this article, we study an author’s citation curve and we define two new areas related to this curve. We call these “penalty areas”, since the greater they are, the more an author’s performance is penalized. We exploit these areas to establish new indices, namely Perfectionism Index and eXtreme Perfectionism Index (XPI), aiming at categorizing researchers in two distinct categories: “influentials” and “mass producers”; the former category produces articles which are (almost all) with high impact, and the latter category produces a lot of articles with moderate or no impact at all. Using data from Microsoft Academic Service, we evaluate the merits mainly of PI as a useful tool for scientometric studies. We establish its effectiveness into separating the scientists into influentials and mass producers; we demonstrate its robustness against self-citations, and its uncorrelation to traditional indices. Finally, we apply PI to rank prominent scientists in the areas of databases, networks and multimedia, exhibiting the strength of the index in fulfilling its design goal.
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Notes
In the sequel of the article for the sake of simplicity, we use the term h-core and h-core-square interchangeably.
We selected authors with relatively small number of publications and citations for better readability of the figures.
Usually when a publication is cited once or twice during its total “life”, these citations are self-citations.
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Acknowledgments
The authors wish to thank Professor Sofia Kouidou, Vice-rector of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, for stating the basic question that led to the present research.
The authors would also wish to thank Professor Vana Doufexi for reviewing and editing the final release of this article.
The offer of Microsoft to provide gratis their database API is appreciated.
Finally, D.Katsaros acknowledges the support of the Research Committee of the University of Thessaly through the project “Web observatory for research activities in the University of Thessaly”.
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PI, note here that PI is not related and should not be confused with the term Perfect Index (Woeginger in Math Soc Sci 56: 224–232, 2008).
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Sidiropoulos, A., Katsaros, D. & Manolopoulos, Y. Ranking and identifying influential scientists versus mass producers by the Perfectionism Index. Scientometrics 103, 1–31 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-014-1515-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-014-1515-0