U-index: A new Universal metric as unique indicator of researcher's contributions to academic knowledge

Abstract

Quantification and ranking of scholars’ output via a consideration of the citations of one's works has been of global interest within the last two decades, after criticisms of the approach that uses the Journal Impact Factor as a proxy. Various metrics exist but are deemed flawed due to their susceptibility to manipulations and citation preponderance variability across different fields of study. Hence, we present the Universal Index (U-index or U) towards resolving the controversy surrounding the indication of an entity's contributions to academic knowledge. U-index is the average weighted ratio of citation rates per annum of one's research works relative to the Impact Factor of the respective publication outlets. Some attributes and benefits of this new metric are established herein. This work demonstrates the viability of U-index from synthesis as well as from an analytical survey of the publication portfolio of 32 researchers. An evaluation of Kendall tau coefficient shows that for a mix of scholars from diverse fields, ranking these researchers based on U-index is distinct from, and preferred to ratings that use h-index. A download link is provided to the Universal Index Calculator freeware, developed to analyze a scholar's profile generated from indexing databases such as Google Scholar.