2014/05/04 by Xiaojun Wan, Wan, Xiaojun
Computer Science · Decision Sciences · Medicine · Physics and Astronomy · #Academic Publishing and Open Access #Digital Libraries (cs.DL) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #FOS: Physical sciences #Health and Medical Research Impacts #Physics and Society (physics.soc-ph) #cs.DL #physics.soc-ph #scientometrics and bibliometrics research
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1405.0641
arxiv created 2014/05/04 · openalex publication_date 2014/05/04 · arxiv updated 2014/05/06 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
h-index has become the most popular indicator for quantifying a scientist's scientific impact in various scientific fields. h-index is defined as the largest number of papers with citation number larger than or equal to h and it treats each citation equally. However, different citations usually come from different papers with different influence and quality, and a citation from a highly influential paper is a greater recognition of the target paper than a citation from an ordinary paper. Based on this assumption, we proposed a new indicator named x-index to quantify a scientist's scientific impact by considering only the citations coming from influential papers. x-index is defined as the largest number of papers with influential citation number larger than or equal to x, where each influential citation comes from a paper for which the average ACNPP (Average Citation Number Per Paper) of its authors larger than or equal to x . Through analysis on the APS dataset, we find that the proposed x-index has much better ability to discriminate between Physics Prize Winners and ordinary physicists.