Evolutionary Biological Data Science Laboratory

pure h-index (fractional credit)

The pure h-index (Wan et al. 2007) is similar to the h_i-index in that it attempts to adjust for multiple authors. The index allows for different methods of assigning authorship credit. If one wishes to assign all authors equal credit, or if one does not have information about authorship order, one can assign fractional credit per author, which essentially means this metric is simply the h-index divided by the square-root of the average number of authors in the core, thus differing from h_i only by the square-root in the denominator (which makes the fractional version of the pure h-index less harsh than h_i by not punishing co-authorship as severely).

$$h_{p.\text{frac}}=\frac{h}{\sqrt{\frac{\sum\limits_{i=1}^{h}{A_i}}{h}}}$$

Example

Publications are ordered by number of citations, from highest to lowest.

Citations (Ci)	47	26	19	15	11	10	4	3	2	1	1	1	1	0	0	0	0	0
Rank (i)	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10	11	12	13	14	15	16	17	18
						h = 6
Authors (Ai)	3	3	3	2	1	4	4	4	1	4	2	1	1	4	2	1	1	1

The h-index is 6 and the sum of the authors for publications in the core is 16, thus h_i = 3.6742.

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