TY  - JOUR
EP  - 832
ID  - eprints2376
VL  - 7
JF  - Journal of Informetrics
IS  - 4
UR  - http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1751157713000564
Y1  - 2013/10//
KW  - Science of science; Citation impact; Rank stability; h-Index
TI  - The Z-index: A geometric representation of productivity and impact which accounts for information in the entire rank-citation profile
AV  - public
SP  - 823
N2  - We present a simple  generalization of Hirsch's h-index, Z \equiv \sqrt{h^{2}+C}/\sqrt 5, where C is the total number of citations. Z is aimed at correcting  the potentially excessive penalty made by h on a scientist's highly cited papers, because for the majority of scientists analyzed, we find the excess citation fraction (C-h^{2})/C  to be distributed closely around the value 0.75, meaning that 75 percent of the author's impact is neglected. Additionally, Z is less sensitive to local changes in a scientist's citation profile, namely perturbations  which increase h while only marginally affecting C. Using real career data for 476 physicists careers and 488 biologist careers, we analyze both the distribution of Z and the rank stability of Z with respect to the Hirsch index h and the Egghe index g. We analyze careers distributed across a wide range of total impact, including top-cited physicists and biologists for benchmark comparison. In practice, the Z-index requires the same information needed to calculate h and could be effortlessly  incorporated within career profile 
databases, such as Google Scholar and ResearcherID. Because Z incorporates information from the entire publication profile while being more robust than h and g to local perturbations, we argue that Z is better suited for ranking comparisons in academic  decision-making scenarios comprising a large number of scientists. 
PB  - Elsevier
A1  - Petersen, Alexander M.
A1  - Succi, Sauro
ER  -