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Some indices violating the basic domination relation

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Abstract

Ever since the h-index was proposed by Hirsch (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA 102(46): 16569–16572, 2005), it has aroused widespread interest in academia. Axiomatic and mathematical interpretations of the h-index and its variants have been widely discussed. This study proposes the following basic domination relation: Assume that scholars X and Y have the same number of papers and these are sorted by the number of citations. If for all i, scholar Y’s ith paper is cited no less than scholar X’s ith paper, then scholar Y cannot be considered inferior to scholar X. We propose that any index which violates the basic domination relation is defective. The a-index, m-index, e-index and q 2-index are demonstrated to violate this relation, implying these four indices should be used with caution.

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Acknowledgements

This research was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 71273250).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Management, University of Science and Technology of China, 96 Jinzhai Road, Hefei, 230026, China

    Qiang Wu & Peng Zhang

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  1. Qiang Wu
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  2. Peng Zhang
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Correspondence to Qiang Wu.

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Wu, Q., Zhang, P. Some indices violating the basic domination relation. Scientometrics 113, 495–500 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-017-2475-y

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