On the influence of uncited publications on a researcher’s h-index

Abstract

A researcher’s output comprises cited and uncited papers. Nevertheless, the conventional h-index considers only the cited papers; and, in particular, awards a score to the so-called high-impact papers. Consequently, the h-index fails to assess the overall performance of a researcher. The purpose of this paper is to propose an author-level metric, called an apparent h-index, that augments the h-index with the number of cited/uncited papers of a researcher. The apparent h-index (hA-index) is defined as the product of the h-index and the fraction of cited papers of a researcher. Thus, the more the uncited papers of a researcher, the less the fraction of the cited papers; and, hence, the low the hA-index. In consequence, as opposed to the h-index, the hA-index can increase or decrease depending on the future performance output of a researcher. If a researcher has all his/her publications cited, the hA-index equals the h-index; and the researcher “saves” his/her h-index. However, if at least one of the publications of a researcher is uncited, the hA-index becomes lower than the h-index. This means that the hA-index takes uncited papers into consideration by way of penalization. Case studies for Physicists and Petroleum Engineers have been presented; and the results show that a researcher with a higher h-index, but with a lot of uncited papers may have a lower apparent h-index than a researcher with a lower h-index but very few uncited papers. The proposed hA-index will ensure that researchers are wary of what they “throw” in the literature.