Analysis of the ch-index: an indicator to evaluate the diffusion of scientific research output by citers

Abstract

This paper focuses the attention on the ch-index, a recent bibliometric indicator similar to the Hirsch (h) index, to evaluate the published research output of a scientist (Ajiferuke and Wolfram, Proceedings of the 12th international conference of the international society for scientometrics and informetrics. Rio de Janeiro, pp. 798-808, 2009). Ch-index is defined as the number such that, for a general group of scientific publications, ch publications are cited by at least ch different citers while the other publications are cited by no more than ch different citers. The basic difference from the classical h is that, according to ch, the diffusion of one author's publication is evaluated on the basis of the number of different citing authors (or citers), rather than the number of received citations. The goal of this work is to discuss the pros and cons of ch and identify its connection with h. A large sample of scientists in the Quality Engineering/Management field are analyzed so as to investigate the novel indicator's characteristics. Then, the analysis is preliminarily extended to other scientific disciplines. The most important result is that ch is almost insensitive to self-citations and/or citations made by recurrent citers, and it can be profitably used for complementing h.

The citer-success-index: a citer-based indicator to select a subset of elite papers

“…The diagram in Fig. 7-which is constructed using cCT i = " q and CT i = " r (in Table 4)-shows a strong correlation (R 2 & 89 %), similar to that between ch and h (Franceschini et al 2010;Egghe 2012). All the points of the graph-although resulting from articles of different scientific fields-tend to be distributed around the same trend line, which is very close to the bisector of the cs-s plane.…”

“…The indicator is the ch-index, which is a variant of the very well-known hindex (Hirsch, 2005). The ch-index was empirically analyzed by Franceschini et al (2010), showing (i) the general correlation between ch and h, and (ii) the potential of ch in complementing the information given by h. A theoretical interpretation of the correlation between ch and h was recently provided by Egghe (2012).…”

Modern Assessment Method of Research Outcome Methodological Significance

“…Modern specialists mostly agree that monitoring is unthinkable without the models of the control system [7,[9][10][11][12][13][14].…”

“…Science is well known to be a social institution and a social and cultural phenomenon; its role in the civilization development cannot be overestimated [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11]. In the recent decades, science has turned into the 'industry of new knowledge', which necessitated theoretical understanding of this trend.…”

Bibliometric positioning of scientific manufacturing journals: a comparative analysis

“…Another tangible sign of the popularity of h is the appearance of many proposals for new variants and improvements (Banks 2006;Batista et al 2006;Braun et al 2006;BiHui et al 2007;Burrell 2007;Katsaros et al 2007;Sidiropoulos et al 2007;Antonakis and Lalive 2008;Woeginger 2008;Franceschini and Maisano 2009;Lehmann et al 2010;Schreiber 2010;Franceschini et al 2010). Braun et al (2006) proposed using the h-index for evaluating and comparing scientific journals as well.…”