Further clarifications about the success-index

The aim of this brief communication is to reply to a letter by Kosmulski (Journal of Informetrics 6(3):368–369, 2012), which criticizes a recent indicator called “success-index”. The most interesting features of this indicator, presented in Franceschini et al. (Scientometrics, in press), are: (i) allowing the selection of an “elite” subset from a set of publications and (ii) implementing the field-normalization at the level of an individual publication. We show that the Kosmulski's criticism is unfair and inappropriate, as it is the result of a misinterpretation of the indicator.