From a Success Index to a Success Multiplier

Abstract

Introduction: The Success Index Recently Kosmulski (2011) and Franceschini et al. (2012a) introduced the success index. This indicator, or better, family of indicators, is constructed as follows. One considers a set of articles and collects for each of these the number of citations received over a given citation window W. In a first step, a binary score (zero or one) is determined for each of these articles: the score is one if the citations received by a particular article reach a certain threshold value and it is zero otherwise. This threshold can be determined in a variety of ways (which is why we say that the success index is actually a family of indicators). In a next step the success index of this set of articles with respect to a particular threshold is defined as the number of publications that has reached the threshold, or stated otherwise: the sum of all binary scores. Some variations of this index can be considered in which, for instance, time plays a role (Kosmulski, 2011). Among other proposals, the following thresholds could be used (Kosmulski, 2011; Franceschini et al., 2012a, b): a.) The number of references (each publication's citations is compared with its own number of references). This is the original proposal by Kosmulski (2011). b.) The mean or the median number of references in articles published in the same journal and year as the article under consideration. c) The mean or the median number of citations received by articles published in the same journal and year as the article under consideration, where citations are gathered over the same period W (Franceschini et al., 2012a,b). Kosmulski referred to this proposal as a modesty index, as it would reward publication of high-impact articles in lower impact journals (Kosmulski, 2012). We note that, in general, an index can be defined as a number, derived from a formula, characterizing a property of a dataset. As such, this index is an indicator for a particular characteristic. In the case of a success index, the set of data is a set of articles and their citations, and its value is used as a proxy for the 'success'-the term visibility or popularity would be more to the point-of this dataset and the corresponding entity (scientist, department, journal). In this contribution we provide a short review of the family of success indices and introduce the success multiplier, a non-discrete version of the success index. The success multiplier is a number indicating to which extent citations reached or exceeded a threshold value. Examples are provided for articles published in the Journal of the American