The h-index and its alternatives: An application to the 100 most prolific economists

Research output: Contribution to JournalArticleAcademicpeer-review

Abstract

The h-index is a recent but already quite popular way of measuring research quality and quantity. However, it discounts highly-cited papers. The g-index corrects for this, but it is sensitivity to the number of never-cited papers. Besides, h- or g-index-based rankings have a large number of ties. Therefore, this paper introduces two new indices, and tests their performance for the 100 most prolific economists. A researcher has a t-number (f-number) of t (f) if t (f) is the largest number for which it holds that she has t (f) publications for which the geometric (harmonic) average number of citations is at least t (f). The new indices overcome the shortcomings of the old indices.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)317-324
Number of pages8
JournalScientometrics
Volume80
Issue number2
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Jul 2009

Cite this