The influence of self‐citation corrections and the fractionalised counting of multi‐authored manuscripts on the Hirsch index

Abstract

Abstract The Hirsch index or h ‐index is widely used to quantify the impact of an individual's scientific research output, determining the highest number h of a scientist's papers that received at least h citations. Fractionalised counting of the publications is an appropriate way to distribute the impact of a paper among all the coauthors of a multi‐authored manuscript in an easy way, leading to a simple modification h m of the h ‐index. On the other hand the exclusion of self‐citations allows one to sharpen the index, what is appropriate, because self‐citations are usually not reflecting the significance of a publication. I have previously analysed the citation records of 26 physicists discussing the sharpened index h s as well as the modification h m of the original h ‐index. In the present investigation I combine these two procedures yielding the modified sharpened index h ms . For a better comparison, interpolated indices are utilized. The correlations between the indices are rather strong, but nevertheless the positions of some datasets change, in a few cases significantly, depending on whether they are put into order according to the values of h , h m , h s , or h ms . This leads to the conclusion that the additional effort in determining the modified sharpened index h ms is worth performing in order to obtain a fairer evaluation of the citation records.