Year based EM-index: a new approach to evaluate the scientific impact of scholars

Abstract

In the research community, generally the assessment of scholarly impact of an individual is based on citation counts of publications. Instead of this a different approach, year based h-indices have been developed based on different parameters such as total number of publications in year, total citation count earned by all the publications published in a particular year and the total number of citations earned in a particular year by all the publications which are published in any year. This index used the concept of original h-index to determine the index value. But the h-index suffers with big hit problems and the year based indices do not account the h-index big hit problems. To overcome this limitation of year based indices, we have extend the year based h-index with the EM-index and have defined a new approach named year based EM-index with three variants, which are year based EM-index by publications, publication year citations count and citation year citations. This year based EM-index considers only the h-core articles for scientific evaluation, but all those year based indices do not consider all items which have been occurring at least one time. To overcome this limitation of year based EM-index, we have extended the year based EM-index with $$\hbox {EM}^{'}$$ -index and have defined year based $$\hbox {EM}^{'}$$ -index, that consider all the items which occur at least one time. To legitimate the proposed method, an experimental study has been made on 89 scientists publication data, who are working in scientiometrics and bibliometrics fields. The experimental results show the capabilities of the year based EM-index and $$\hbox {EM}^{'}$$ -index over the year based h-indices.