Regular articleAn empirical and theoretical critique of the Euclidean index

•The Euclidean index is compared to basic units, simple and complex indicators.•The Euclidean index does not provide novel information, or more robust.•It performs author ranking authors slightly more robustly than h-index based indicators.•Ranking of individuals is strongly discouraged.

The recently proposed Euclidean index offers a novel approach to measure the citation impact of academic authors, in particular as an alternative to the h-index. We test if the index provides new, robust information, not covered by existing bibliometric indicators, discuss the measurement scale and the degree of distinction between analytical units the index offers. We find that the Euclidean index does not outperform existing indicators on these topics and that the main application of the index would be solely for ranking, which is not seen as a recommended practice.