${\mathbf{h}}_{\alpha }$: An index to quantify an individual's scientific leadership

Abstract

The $\alpha$ person is the dominant person in a group. We define the $\alpha$-author of a paper as the author of the paper with the highest $h$-index among all the coauthors, and an $\alpha$-paper of a scientist as a paper authored or coauthored by the scientist where he/she is the $\alpha$-author. For most but not all papers in the literature there is only one $\alpha$-author. We define the $h_{\alpha }$ index of a scientist as the number of papers in the $h$-core of the scientist (i.e. the set of papers that contribute to the $h$-index of the scientist) where this scientist is the $\alpha$-author. We also define the $h_{\alpha }^{\prime }$ index of a scientist as the number of $\alpha$-papers of this scientist that have $\ge$ $h_{\alpha }^{\prime }$ citations. $h_{\alpha }$ and $h_{\alpha }^{\prime }$ contain similar information, while $h_{\alpha }^{\prime }$ is conceptually more appealing it is harder to obtain from existing databases, hence of less current practical interest. We propose that the $h_{\alpha }$ and/or $h_{\alpha }^{\prime }$ indices, or other variants discussed in the paper, are useful complements to the $h$-index of a scientist to quantify his/her scientific achievement, that rectify an inherent drawback of the $h$-index, its inability to distinguish between authors with different coauthorships patterns. A high $h$ index in conjunction with a high $h_{\alpha }/h$ ratio is a hallmark of scientific leadership.

arXiv commentSome changes in response to referees' comments

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Cited by in corpus (1)

• Crediting multi-authored papers to single authors