Evolutionary Biological Data Science Laboratory

career years h-index by average citations per year

The career years h-index by average citations per year (Mahbuba and Rousseau 2013) is similar to the career years h-index by citations and career years h-index by publications, but is based on the average number of citations generated per publication per year, rather than on the total publications or total citations for each year. One creates a list of years ranked by average citation count per publication 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 average citations per year is the largest value h for which at least h years have publications with an average of h citations.

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

Because the average number of citations will often not be an integer, the authors recommend interpolating between this and the next largest value, as with the real h-index, in order to more accurately estimate the metric.

$$h_{int}=\frac{\left(h+1\right)\frac{C_h}{P_h}-h\frac{C_{h+1}}{P_{h+1}}}{1-\frac{C_{h+1}}{P_{h+1}}+\frac{C_h}{P_h}}.$$

Example

Years are ordered by average number of citations per publication from that year, from highest to lowest.

Year (yi)	1997	1998	2000	1999	2001
Publications (Pi)	6	2	5	1	4
Citations (Ci)	97	15	23	4	2
Average Citations per Publication(Ci/Pi)	16.17	7.50	4.60	4.00	0.50
Rank (i)	1	2	3	4	5
				h = 4

The largest rank where i ≤ C_i/P_i is 4. The interpolated rank betweeen this and the next largest value is 4.00.

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