Evolutionary Biological Data Science Laboratory

career years h-index by publications

The career years h-index by publications (Mahbuba and Rousseau 2013) is a measure of publication intensity or distribution, rather than citation intensity 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 publication count. This list is then processed in the same manner as a typical h-type index, namely the career years h-index by publications is the largest value h for which at least h years have h publications.

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

This metric helps indicate whether the publication output 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 publication counts and career lengths; 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 publications, from highest to lowest.

Year (yi)	1997	2000	2001	1998	1999
Publications (Pi)	6	5	4	2	1
Rank (i)	1	2	3	4	5
			h = 3

The largest rank where i ≤ P_i is 3.

History