 How to derive an advantage from the arbitrariness of the g-indexMichael Schreiber Journal of Informetrics, 2013, vol. 7, issue 2, 555-561 Abstract: The definition of the g-index is as arbitrary as that of the h-index, because the threshold number g2 of citations to the g most cited papers can be modified by a prefactor at one's discretion, thus taking into account more or less of the highly cited publications within a dataset. In a case study I investigate the citation records of 26 physicists and show that the prefactor influences the ranking in terms of the generalized g-index less than for the generalized h-index. I propose specifically a prefactor of 2 for the g-index, because then the resulting values are of the same order of magnitude as for the common h-index. In this way one can avoid the disadvantage of the original g-index, namely that the values are usually substantially larger than for the h-index and thus the precision problem is substantially larger; while the advantages of the g-index over the h-index are kept. Like for the generalized h-index, also for the generalized g-index different prefactors might be more useful for investigations which concentrate only on top scientists with high citation frequencies or on junior researchers with small numbers of citations. Keywords: g-index; Generalized g-index; h-index; Citation analysis; Evaluation (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:infome:v:7:y:2013:i:2:p:555-561 DOI: 10.1016/j.joi.2013.02.003 Access Statistics for this article Journal of Informetrics is currently edited by Leo Egghe More articles in Journal of Informetrics from Elsevier |
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