P-score: a reputation bibliographic index that complements citation counts

Abstract

The notions of reputation and popularity in academia are critical for taking decisions on research grants, faculty position tenure, and research excellence awards. These notions are almost always associated with the publication track records of researchers. Thus, it is important to assess publication track records quantitatively. To quantify publication records, bibliographic indices are usually adopted and, among these, citation-based indices such as the H-index are frequently considered. In this paper we study the correlation between P-score, a publication record index and H-index, a very popular citation-based index, in the setting of conference ranking. While H-indices reflect the popularity of a given publication or researcher in academia, P-scores can reflect the reputation of a publication or researcher among its peers, considering a reference set of reputable researchers. Popularity and reputation are frequently considered to be equivalent properties in the formulation of citation based indices, however these properties are not identical. Indeed, we first show that H-indices and P-scores are correlated with a Kendall-Tau coefficient that exceeds 0.5. However, we also notice that they show important differences. Particularly, we identify publication venues with high H-indices and low P-scores, as well as venues with low H-indices and high P-scores. We provide interpretations for these findings and discuss how they can be used by research funding councils and committees to better support their funding decisions.