Towards designing the Indicator for Scholarly Academic Research Impact based on h-index

Abstract

Present paper discusses Scholarly Academic Research Impact (SARI). According to J. E. Hirsch, the main criteria for devising an indicator are number of citations, scientific age of author, subject of the papers, self-citations, simplicity, universal applicability, least sensitive to small change of bibliographic record etc. The h-index has included some of these criteria. However some criteria still need to be incorporated during calculating h-index. Here I have tried to consider some relevant components to h-index for better reflection of SARI. I think h-index will be in core but some other measurements should be incorporated for better reflection of the impact. The total number of citations or average number of citations per article should be included to for calculating the SARI. G-index includes some articles having very high citations but does not include citations beyond hirsch‟s core. But hT-index has the provision to give weightages of all the citations of all the articles even beyond Hirsch‟s core but it is very complicated to understand and to calculate. The scientist having higher scientific age naturally will get more citations than the younger, so we need to incorporate this criterion when calculating SARI. Therefore technique should be developed to conform the relation “SARI will be inversely proportional to Scientific Age of the researcher or scientist”. The SARI should have universal applicability (for author, journal, publisher, country etc.). Again variations among the disciplines and subjects need to be kept in mind when designing SARI, so that the issue should be normalized. The language biasness is very hard to avoid during designing SARI. There are so many indicators like JIF, h-index and its variants, altmetrics etc, but my proposal is to develop a single indicator which should include all the aspects of all the indicators as far as possible. In the present context of electronic web environment we have to measure societal impact along with the scholarly academic impact. In this regard „altmetrics‟ is basically the tool for weighing societal impact of the scholarly articles by counting number of downloaded, viewed, re-used, shared, liked etc. We cannot ignore these criteria in the social networking environment. But altmetrics is not so crystallized as it depends on web visibility and validation. Therefore present study intentionally has excluded altmetrics aspect of SARI. I have not given any concrete formula rather just have wanted to draw a theory for designing a SARI indicator based on h-index.