Abstract
This paper focuses the attention on the ch-index, a recent bibliometric indicator similar to the Hirsch (h) index, to evaluate the published research output of a scientist (Ajiferuke and Wolfram, Proceedings of the 12th international conference of the international society for scientometrics and informetrics. Rio de Janeiro, pp. 798–808, 2009). Ch-index is defined as the number such that, for a general group of scientific publications, ch publications are cited by at least ch different citers while the other publications are cited by no more than ch different citers. The basic difference from the classical h is that, according to ch, the diffusion of one author’s publication is evaluated on the basis of the number of different citing authors (or citers), rather than the number of received citations. The goal of this work is to discuss the pros and cons of ch and identify its connection with h. A large sample of scientists in the Quality Engineering/Management field are analyzed so as to investigate the novel indicator’s characteristics. Then, the analysis is preliminarily extended to other scientific disciplines. The most important result is that ch is almost insensitive to self-citations and/or citations made by recurrent citers, and it can be profitably used for complementing h.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Ajiferuke, I., & Wolfram, D. (2009). Citer analysis as a measure of research impact: Library and information science as a case study. In B. Larsen & J. Leta (Eds.), Proceedings of the 12th international conference of the international society for scientometrics and informetrics (ISSI) (pp. 798–808). Rio de Janeiro.
Ajiferuke, I., & Wolfram, D. (2010). Citer analysis as a measure of research impact: Library and information science as a case study. Scientometrics (to appear). doi:10.1007/s11192-009-0127-6.
Amin, M., & Mabe, M. (2000). Impact factors: Use and abuse. In Perspectives in publishing (n. 1, October 2000) Oxford: Elsevier Science. http://www.elsevier.com.
Anderson, T. R., Hankin, R. K. S., & Killworth, P. D. (2008). Beyond the Durfee square: Enhancing the h-index to score total publication output. Scientometrics, 76(3), 577–588.
Antonakis, J., & Lalive, R. (2008). Quantifying scholarly impact: IQp versus the Hirsch h. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 59(6), 956–969.
ASQ—American Society for Quality. (2009, September 10). www.asq.org.
Banks, M. G. (2006). An extension of the Hirsch index: Indexing scientific topics and compounds. Scientometrics, 69(1), 161–168.
Batista, P. D., Campiteli, M. G., Kinouchi, O., & Martinez, A. S. (2006). Is it possible to compare researchers with different scientific interests? Scientometrics, 68(1), 179–189.
BiHui, J., LiMing, L., Rousseau, R., & Egghe, L. (2007). The R- and AR-indices: Complementing the h-index. Chinese Science Bulletin, 52(6), 855–963.
Bornmann, L., & Daniel, H. D. (2007). What do we know about the h index? Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 58(9), 1381–1385.
Braun, T., Glänzel, W., & Schubert, A. (1985). Scientometric Indicators: A 32-country comparative evaluation of publishing performance and citation impact. Philadelphia: World Scientific.
Braun, T., Glänzel, W., Schubert, A. (2006). A Hirsch-type index for journals. The Scientist, 69(1), 169–173.
Burrell, Q. L. (2007a). On the h-index, the size of the Hirsch core and Jin’s A-index. Journal of Informetrics, 1(2), 170–177.
Burrell, Q. L. (2007b). Hirsch index or Hirsch rate? Some thoughts arising from Liang’s data. Scientometrics, 73(1), 19–28.
Castillo, C., Donato, D., & Gionis, A. (2007). Estimating number of citations using author reputation. In String processing and information retrieval (pp. 107–117). Berlin/Heidelberg: Springer.
Chang, K.H. (1975). Evaluation and survey of a subfield of physics: Magnetic resonance and relaxation studies in The Netherlands, FOM-Report n. 37175, Utrecht.
Collegio dei presidenti di corso di studi in Matematica (2008) Considerazioni e proposte relative agli indicatori di qualità di attività scientifica e di ricerca, e ai parametri per le valutazioni comparative. http://users.unimi.it/barbieri/indicatoriMAT_29nov08.pdf.
Costas, R., & Bordons, M. (2007). The h-index: Advantages, limitations and its relation with other bibliometric indicators at the micro level. Journal of Informetrics, 1(3), 193–203.
Cronin, B. (2001). Hyperauthorship: A postmodern perversion or evidence of a structural shift in scholarly communication practices? Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 52(7), 558–569.
Da Luz, M. P., Marques-Portella, C., Mendlowicz, M., Gleiser, S., Coutinho, E. S., & Figueira, I. (2008). Institutional h-index: The performance of a new metric in the evaluation of Brazilian psychiatric post-graduation programs. Scientometrics, 77(2), 361–368. doi:10.1007/s11192-007-1964-9.
Debackere, K., Thijs, B., & Schubert, A. (2006). A concise review on the role of author self-citations in information science, bibliometrics and science policy. Scientometrics, 67(2), 263–277.
Dieks, D., & Chang, K. H. (1976). Differences in impact of scientific publications: Some indices derived from a citation analysis. Social Studies of Science, 6(2), 247–267. doi:10.1177/030631277600600204.
Egghe, L. (2006). Theory and practise of the g-index. Scientometrics, 69(1), 131–152.
Egghe, L. (2010). The Hirsch-index and related impact measures. In B. Cronin (Ed.), Annual Review of Information Science and Technology (ARIST), Vol. 44.
Franceschini, F., Galetto, M., & Maisano, D. (2007). Management by measurement: Designing key indicators and performance measurement systems. Berlin: Springer Verlag.
Franceschini, F., & Maisano, D. (2009). The Hirsch index in manufacturing and quality engineering. Quality and Reliability Engineering International, 25, 987–995. doi:10.1002/qre.1016.
Franceschini, F., & Maisano, D. (2010a). Analysis of the Hirsch index’s operational properties. European Journal of Operational Research, 203(2), 494–504. doi:10.1016/j.ejor.2009.08.001.
Franceschini, F., & Maisano, D. (2010b). The Hirsch spectrum: A novel tool for analysing scientific Journals. Journal of Informetrics, 4(1), 64–73. doi:10.1016/j.joi.2009.08.003.
Franceschini, F., & Maisano, D. (2010c). A survey of quality engineering-management journals by bibliometric indicators. Quality and Reliability Engineering International (to appear). doi:10.1002/qre.1083.
Frandsen, T. F. (2007). Journal self-citations—analysing the JIF mechanism. Journal of Informetrics, 1(1), 47–58.
Garfield, E. (2006). The history and meaning of the journal impact factor. Journal of the American Medical Association, 295(1), 90–93.
Glänzel, W. (2006). On the opportunities and limitations of the h-index. Science Focus, 1(1), 10–11.
Glänzel, W., & Moed, H. F. (2002). Journal impact measures in bibliometric research. Scientometrics, 53(2), 171–193.
Glänzel, W., & Thijs, B. (2004). Does co-authorship inflate the share of self-citations? Scientometrics, 61(3), 395–404.
Goffman, W., & Newill, V. A. (1964). Generalization of epidemic theory: an application to the transmission of ideas. Nature, 204, 225–228.
Harzing A. W. (2009). Reflections on the h-index, www.harzing.com.
Harzing, A. W., & van der Wal, R. (2008). Google Scholar as a new source for citation analysis. Ethics in Science and Environmental Politics, 8(11), 61–73.
Hirsch, J. E. (2005). An index to quantify an individual’s scientific research output. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 102, 16569–16572.
Hirsch, J. E. (2007). Does the h index have predictive power? Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 104(49), 19193–19198.
Katsaros D., Sidiropoulos A., & Manolopous Y. (2007, April 27). Age decaying H-index for social network of citations. In Proceedings of workshop on social aspects of the web poznan. Poland.
Kelly, C. D., & Jennions, M. D. (2006). The h index and career assessment by numbers. Trends in Ecology and Evolution, 21(4), 167–170.
Lehmann, S., Jackson, A.D., & Lautrup, B.E. (2005). Measures and mismeasures of scientific quality. http://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0512238.
Lehmann, S., Jackson, A. D., & Lautrup, B. E. (2006). Measures for measures. Nature, 444, 1003–1004.
Meho, L. I., Yang, K. (2007). Impact of data sources on citation counts and rankings of LIS faculty: Web of Science vs. Scopus and Google scholar. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 58(13), 2105–2125.
Mingers, J. (2009). Measuring the research contribution of management academics using the Hirsch-index. Journal of the Operational Research Society, 60(9), 1143–1153. doi:10.1057/jors.2008.94.
Moed, H. F. (2005). Citation analysis in research evaluation. Dordrecht: Springer, ISBN 1402037139.
Nature Cell Biology Editorial. (2009). Credit where credit is due. Nature Cell Biology 11(1), 1. doi:10.1038/ncb0109-1.
Orbay, M., Karamustafaoglu, O., & Oner, F. (2007). What does Hirsch index evolution explain us? A case study: Turkish Journal of Chemistry. Biblios, 27(8), 1–5.
Rousseau, R. (2006). New developments related to the Hirsch index, E-prints in Library and Information Science (ELIS), eprints.rclis.org/6376/.
Saad, G. (2006). Exploring the h-index at the author and journal levels using bibliometric data of productive consumer scholars and business-related journals respectively. Scientometrics, 69(1), 117–120.
Schreiber, M. (2007). Self-citation corrections for the Hirsch index. EuroPhysics Letters 78. doi:10.1209/0295-5075/78/30002.
Schreiber, M. (2008). A modification of the h-index: the h m -index accounts for multi-authored manuscripts. http://arxiv.org/abs/0805.2000v1.
Sidiropoulos, A., Katsaros, D., & Manolopoulos, Y. (2007). Generalized Hirsch h-index for disclosing latent facts in citation networks. Scientometrics, 72(2), 253–280.
Suárez-Balseiro, C., García-Zorita, C., & Sanz-Casado, E. (2009). Multi-authorship and its impact on the visibility of research from Puerto Rico. Information Processing and Management, 45(4), 469–476.
Thomson Reuters. (2010). 2008 Journal citation reports—science edition. http://www.isiknowledge.com.
Van Raan, A. F. J. (2006). Comparison of the Hirsch-index with standard bibliometric indicators and with peer judgment for 147 chemistry research groups. Scientometrics, 67(3), 491–502.
Wendl, M. (2007). H-index: however ranked, citations need context. Nature, 449, 403.
Westney, L. C. H. (1998). Historical rankings of science and technology: A citationist perspective. The Journal of the Association for History and Computing, 1(1). http://journals2.iranscience.net:800/mcel.pacificu.edu/mcel.pacificu.edu/history/jahcI1/Westney/Westney.htm.
Woeginger, G. H. (2008). An axiomatic characterization for the Hirsch-index. Mathematical Social Sciences, 56, 224–232.
Acknowledgments
The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their valuable suggestions to improve the manuscript.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Franceschini, F., Maisano, D., Perotti, A. et al. Analysis of the ch-index: an indicator to evaluate the diffusion of scientific research output by citers. Scientometrics 85, 203–217 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-010-0165-0
Received:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-010-0165-0