DS-Index: Ranking Authors Distinctively in an Academic Network

The impact and productivity of researchers are assessed using bibliometric parameters, such as the number of publications and citation analysis. A number of indices exist that use these parameters, but almost all of them overlook citation pattern of the researchers, which results in assigning the same index value to the two different authors with different citation patterns. In this paper, a new index called DS-index is proposed, which differentiates among the authors having even a very small change in the citation pattern of their publications. It uniquely identifies the different index values and thus the proper ranking order for authors. The index is applied to the self-developed large DBLP data set having publication data of over 50 years. The results compared with the existing indices using the standard performance evaluation measures confirm that the proposed index performs better by ranking the authors in a distinctive order.