A case study of the arbitrariness of the h-index and the highly-cited-publications indicator

The arbitrariness of the h-index becomes evident, when one requires q × h instead of h citations as the threshold for the definition of the index, thus changing the size of the core of the most influential publications of a dataset. I analyze the citation records of 26 physicists in order to determine how much the prefactor q influences the ranking. Likewise, the arbitrariness of the highly-cited-publications indicator is due to the threshold value, given either as an absolute number of citations or as a percentage of highly cited papers. The analysis of the 26 citation records shows that the changes in the rankings in dependence on these thresholds are rather large and comparable with the respective changes for the h-index.

► The arbitrariness of the h-index is demonstrated by a case study.
► The arbitrariness of the highly-cited-publications indicator is demonstrated by a case study.
► The rankings of 26 scientists change sometimes drastically when the prefactor in the generalized h-index is changed.
► The rankings of 26 scientists change sometimes drastically when the threshold for the highly-cited-publications indicator is changed.