A case study of the arbitrariness of the h-index and the highly-cited-publications indicator
Journal of InformetricsPublished 9 February 2013Open access
Michael Schreiber
Citations22
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TL;DR
The arbitrariness of the h-index becomes evident, when one requires q×h instead of h citations as the threshold for the definition of the index, thus changing the size of the core of the most influential publications of a dataset.
Abstract
The arbitrariness of the h-index becomes evident, when one requires q*h\ninstead of h citations as the threshold for the definition of the index, thus\nchanging the size of the core of the most influential publications of a\ndataset. I analyze the citation records of 26 physicists in order to determine\nhow much the prefactor q influences the ranking. Likewise, the arbitrariness of\nthe highly-cited-publications indicator is due to the threshold value, given\neither as an absolute number of citations or as a percentage of highly cited\npapers. The analysis of the 26 citation records shows that the changes in the\nrankings in dependence on these thresholds are rather large and comparable with\nthe respective changes for the h-index.\n
Keywords
Decision Sciences
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