Evolutionary Biological Data Science Laboratory

career years h-index by citations

The career years h-index by citations (Mahbuba and Rousseau 2013) is a measure of citation intensity or distribution by publication year, rather than by publication as captured by most h-index type indices. Rather than create a list of publications ranked by citation count, one creates a list of years ranked by citation count for all publications from that year. This list is then processed in the same manner as a typical h-type index, namely the career years h-index by citations is the largest value h for which at least h years have publications with h total citations.

$$\text{career years }h\text{ by citations}=\underset{i}{\max}\left(i\leq P_i\right).$$

This metric helps indicate whether the citation impact of a researcher is confined to a limited number of years (smaller value) or is spread more evenly across their career (larger values); it is most useful for comparing among established/older researchers with similar career lengths and citation counts/h-indices; this metric is limiting for young researchers with short careers because the maximum value is the length of the career.

Example

Years are ordered by number of citations for publications from that year, from highest to lowest.

Year (yi)	1997	2000	1998	1999	2001
Citations (Ci)	97	23	15	4	2
Rank (i)	1	2	3	4	5
				h = 4

The largest rank where i ≤ C_i is 4.

History