The HF-rating as a universal complement to the h -index
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The HF‑rating as a universal complement to the h‑index Fassin Yves1 Received: 20 November 2019 © Akadémiai Kiadó, Budapest, Hungary 2020
Abstract Interdisciplinary comparison has been a constant objective of bibliometrics. The wellknown h-index and its alternatives have not achieved this objective. Based on the gh-rating or ghent-rating, a categorization of academic articles into tiers of publications within similar citations ranges, a new ratio is proposed, the high fame hf-ratio. This ratio is calculated as the adjusted average of the weighted factors of the researchers’ best articles; it leads to an associated rating also designated by the symbols AAA, AA, A, BBB, B, C, D, … etc. comparable to financial ratings such as Moody’s and S&P ratings. Adding this rating to the h-index forms the high fame HF-rating. The HF-rating provides the average grade of a researcher’s best papers benchmarked in their field. This new HF-rating induces some qualitative elements in the evaluation of research, includes more selectivity and mitigates between classic h-indices. This universal HF-rating complements the well-known h-index with a relative indication of its influence in its field that also allows inter-field comparison. The methodology is illustrated with examples of researchers from different disciplines with different distributions of citations. Keywords Bibliometrics · Indicators · Index · Rating · Fractional counting · Normalization
Introduction Indicators are essential for research evaluation and constitute the core of applied bibliometrics (Vinkler 2010). Numerous indicators have been proposed in recent years [for a comparative overview see Yan et al. (2016) and Bornmann et al. (2011)]. Many bibliometricians have drawn attention on the difficulty to grasp a complete oeuvre in a single indicator and have suggested additional elements (Costas and Bordons 2007; Bornmann and Daniel 2009; Zhang 2009). Despite the conceptual weakness of any single indicator, the h-index (Hirsch 2005) has been widely accepted as a simple indicator of a researcher’s influence. However, also this indicator has been criticized for a number of drawbacks and inconsistencies (Costas and Bordons 2007; Wendl 2007; Waltman and Van Eck 2012; Bouyssou and Marchant 2011). Especially its inaptitude for benchmarking researchers from different disciplines (Batista et al. 2006) emphasizes the need for contextualization (Wendl 2007). * Fassin Yves [email protected] 1
Universiteit Gent, Gent, Belgium
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Vol.:(0123456789)
Scientometrics
Another important disadvantage is that the h-index does not signal increasing numbers of citations of the most influential (highly-cited) papers (Vinkler 2010, p. 864). Consequently, a number of variants such as the Kosmulski-index h(2) have been proposed (Kosmulski 2006). More recently, a ‘fame’ index f2 has been developed, based on a categorization of academic articles, the gh-rating or ghent-rating (Fassin 2018). The paper is structured as follows. A succinct literature study on recent research on normalization
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