 The w‐index: A measure to assess scientific impact by focusing on widely cited papersQiang Wu Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 2010, vol. 61, issue 3, 609-614 Abstract: Based on the principles of the h‐index, I propose a new measure, the w‐index, as a particularly simple and more useful way to assess the substantial impact of a researcher's work, especially regarding excellent papers. The w‐index can be defined as follows: If w of a researcher's papers have at least 10w citations each and the other papers have fewer than 10(w+1) citations, that researcher's w‐index is w. The results demonstrate that there are noticeable differences between the w‐index and the h‐index, because the w‐index plays close attention to the more widely cited papers. These discrepancies can be measured by comparing the ranks of 20 astrophysicists, a few famous physical scientists, and 16 Price medalists. Furthermore, I put forward the w(q)‐index to improve the discriminatory power of the w‐index and to rank scientists with the same w. The factor q is the least number of citations a researcher with w needed to reach w+1. In terms of both simplicity and accuracy, the w‐index or w(q)‐index can be widely used for evaluation of scientists, journals, conferences, scientific topics, research institutions, and so on. Date: 2010 Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bla:jamist:v:61:y:2010:i:3:p:609-614 Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from Access Statistics for this article More articles in Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology from Association for Information Science & Technology |
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