New tools for complementing the h-index: an empirical study

The h-index, introduced by Hirsch in 2005, is used by major citation databases to evaluate the academic performance of a researcher. The advantages and disadvantages of the h-index have been studied and discussed so far and many authors proposed other well known variants. In this paper we present a new general class of bibliometric indices based on the quality and the quantity of the most relevant publications. We compare some of the obtained indices with the decisions of a Committee of five professors concerning a group of Physicists which applied for the Italian National Scientific Qualification (the so called "Abilitazione Scientifica Nazionale, the new process to recruit University Professors in Italy, based on scientific qualification criteria). Many well known indices, such as the A-index or the e-index, are sensitive to few highly cited publications. Conversely, our approach, based on a sum of increasing and concave functions, is aimed to reward researchers with a more stable and reliable scientific production. The empirical results show that the new class of indices effectively increases the capacity of discrimination among researcher with a similar value of the h-index.