Article ID Journal Published Year Pages File Type
523251 Journal of Informetrics 2013 7 Pages PDF
Abstract

The definition of the g-index is as arbitrary as that of the h-index, because the threshold number g2 of citations to the g most cited papers can be modified by a prefactor at one's discretion, thus taking into account more or less of the highly cited publications within a dataset. In a case study I investigate the citation records of 26 physicists and show that the prefactor influences the ranking in terms of the generalized g-index less than for the generalized h-index. I propose specifically a prefactor of 2 for the g-index, because then the resulting values are of the same order of magnitude as for the common h-index. In this way one can avoid the disadvantage of the original g-index, namely that the values are usually substantially larger than for the h-index and thus the precision problem is substantially larger; while the advantages of the g-index over the h-index are kept. Like for the generalized h-index, also for the generalized g-index different prefactors might be more useful for investigations which concentrate only on top scientists with high citation frequencies or on junior researchers with small numbers of citations.

Related Topics
Physical Sciences and Engineering Computer Science Computer Science Applications
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