EM and EM'-index sequence: Construction and application in scientific assessment of scholars

Abstract

Most of the scientometric indicators use only the total number of citations of an article and produce a single number for scientific assessment of scholars. Although this concept is very simple to compute, it fails to show the scientific productivity and impact of scholars during a time-span or in a year. To overcome this, several time series indicators have been proposed that consider the citations from the entire research career of a scholar. However, these indicators fail to give a comparative assessment of two scholars having same or very similar index value. To overcome this shortcoming, h-index sequence was proposed to assess the impact of scholars during a particular time-span and to compare multiple scholars at a similar stage in their careers. The h-index sequence is based on the h-index formulation. One of the main issues related to the hindex is that it completely ignores the excess citation in scientific assessment; h-index sequence also exhibits a similar behaviour. To overcome these limitations, in this article, we have discussed the EM and EM -index sequence, and performed an empirical study based on yearly citation count earned from all publications of 89 scholars' publication data. The element of the EM and EM -index sequence for a given year shows the impact of a scholar for that year. We conclude that the EM and EM -index sequence could be used as an alternative metrics to asses the impact of scholars.