ConservationBytes.com

Back in April I blogged about an idea I had to provide a more discipline-, gender-, and career stage-balanced way of ranking researchers using citation data.

Most of you are of course aware of the ubiquitous h-index, and its experience-corrected variant, the m-quotient (h-index ÷ years publishing), but I expect that you haven’t heard of the battery of other citation-based indices on offer that attempt to correct various flaws in the h-index. While many of them are major improvements, almost no one uses them.

Why aren’t they used? Most likely because they aren’t easy to calculate, or require trawling through both open-access and/or subscription-based databases to get the information necessary to calculate them.

Hence, the h-index still rules, despite its many flaws, like under-emphasising a researcher’s entire body of work, gender biases, and weighting towards people who have been at it longer. The h-index is also provided free of charge by Google Scholar, so it’s the easiest metric to default to.

So, how does one correct for at least some of these biases while still being able to calculate an index quickly? I think we have the answer.

Since that blog post back in April, a team of seven scientists and I from eight different science disciplines (archaeology, chemistry, ecology, evolution & development, geology, microbiology, ophthalmology, and palaeontology) refined the technique I reported back then, and have submitted a paper describing how what we call the ‘ε-index’ (epsilon index) performs.