I would like to understand what the biggest advantages of the h-index are. It seems to me the advantages are that it balances quantity and quality.
Let’s try the opposite for a decade or two. A measurement strategy that gives high weight to quantity or quality.
Here are some ideas, likely bizarre for reasons others will eagerly point out.
S-index = |N-log(C)|^log(C)
N = number of topics written on as measured by Milojević 2015 or more simply the unique keywords used by the journals to describe the article.
C = total citations.
That formula is a response to Matt Clancy’s paper on innovation getting harder. He points out that the number of topics is slowing down. So the incentive under this paradigm to work either on unique topics or on a few topics intently.
Another idea is to think that as science slows down groups and coalitions are becoming more important.
So here is a second idea, almost certainly terrible.
Average h-index of self and all co-authors. This would be something like a measure of the h-strength of one’s network but gives no reward for the size of the network. One effect might be that it encourages strong research networks, which would have pros and cons, granting more freedom to the more productive clusters but making social life more important.
I would like to understand what the biggest advantages of the h-index are. It seems to me the advantages are that it balances quantity and quality. Let’s try the opposite for a decade or two. A measurement strategy that gives high weight to quantity or quality.
Here are some ideas, likely bizarre for reasons others will eagerly point out.
S-index = |N-log(C)|^log(C)
N = number of topics written on as measured by Milojević 2015 or more simply the unique keywords used by the journals to describe the article. C = total citations.
That formula is a response to Matt Clancy’s paper on innovation getting harder. He points out that the number of topics is slowing down. So the incentive under this paradigm to work either on unique topics or on a few topics intently.
Another idea is to think that as science slows down groups and coalitions are becoming more important.
So here is a second idea, almost certainly terrible.
Average h-index of self and all co-authors. This would be something like a measure of the h-strength of one’s network but gives no reward for the size of the network. One effect might be that it encourages strong research networks, which would have pros and cons, granting more freedom to the more productive clusters but making social life more important.