Evolutionary Biological Data Science Laboratory

first-author h-index

The first-author h-index (Butson and Yu 2010) was designed to rescale outputbetween large and small collaborative research teams under an assumption that larger teams could produce more output per year just by the nature of being larger. It attempts to rescale the h-index based on the number of publications in the h-core that were first-authored (P_fa).

$$h_{fa}=h \frac{P_h + P_{fa}}{P_h}=h + P_{fa}.$$

The authors did not seem to realize that the number of papers in the core P_h is, by definition, equal to h and thus some of the terms cancel, leaving the metric just the sum of h and the number of first-authored papers that make up h. This index ranges from equal to the h-index if the investigator is never a first author of publications in the h-core to double the h-index if they are the first author of every publication in the core.

History