Dear Raivo Stern

There is a lot of discussion about weaknesses and anomalies in the behavior of the H index and its derivatives. Just read, for example, Article The Inconsistency of the h-index

(www.doi.org/10.1002/asi.21678)

Probably any quantitative approach will manifest this type of weakness. In contrast, qualitative methods are accused of lack of objectivity. This drives a bit of a vicious circle of evaluation of science, which has already been noticed eg in:

Conference Paper The Vicious Circle of Evaluation Transparency – An Ignition Paper

Dear Anna Małgorzata Kamińska -

I'm aware of both the praise as well as criticisms to original h-index - these vary wildly depending on disciplines... I'm just looking for someone, who could resonate with J.E. Hirsch in finding the new h_alpha better than the old h...

Dear Dr. Raivo Stern,

Very interesting.

The h-index has been highly criticized and, in the meantime, extensively employed to rank both science and respective performers, due to its straightforward calculation, perhaps: it needs author publications and respective cites number, sorted in descending order, only. Nonetheless, one of the greatest criticisms on h-index is its ever growing property. It will virtually never stop growing over time, even if a scientist stops publishing.

An ideal index that assesses, in a balanced way, a scientist in relation to its peers, on one axis, and over time, on the other, is still pursued.

The new h-alpha-index and h-alpha-index' are by far more complexes to derive. They require information of all the peers a particular scientist (under assessment) has published with in a particular publication, in addition to his/her own, for every work published until that moment, including, of course, respective number of citations.

Like the basic h-index, h-alpha-index and h-alpha-index' will also change over time, impacted now by the time-varying characteristic of core data that composes both new indexes. For instance, if by any means the alpha author, the author with the highest h-index among co-authors within a particular publication, changes in one or more publications over time, all the metrics will changes accordingly. This is expected to impose a barrier, which will prevent the new indexes to grow indefinitely, as compared to the naive h-index. This is a bonus, meaning that, in competitive environment, if a scientist stops publishing, as compared to his/her peers, he/she will invariably witness his/her h-alpha index drifting downward over time.

I hope Harzing PoP and Researchgate incorporate these new metrics into their portfolio, and see what happens then.

Peace and blessings!

Evaluators should not only look at the hinder but also look carefully at the publications

Who is first author

There might be student publishing first

does the author publishes often with different people or not

In what kind of journals

What is the.heart of the authors skills ie which papers does he publishes first

And so on

With the aim to better describe the real impact of the author

Gil Mahe - I agree, there are more criteria to pay attention to in evaluations, but let's stay on topic of various/multiple H-indexes here :)

Classical h index is easy and fine

I don't see much interest in other h values.

Only i10 Index seems interesting