Standard bibliometric indices were re-defined using a generalized concept of “successful paper”. A family-tree based upon the new definitions provides new insights into the relationships between the standard indices, and empty boxes in the family-tree may inspire design of new indices.

Various factors are believed to govern the selection of references in citation networks, but a precise, quantitative determination of their importance has remained elusive. In this paper, we show that three factors can account for the referencing pattern of citation networks for two topics,...

Hypes occur in every domain of human behavior, including scientific research. We show in this contribution that journals and authors who studied the h-index benefited in terms of short-term citations. As, moreover, the introduction of the h-index is more a ‘clever find’ than a first rate...

This paper presents an approach to analyze the thematic evolution of a given research field. This approach combines performance analysis and science mapping for detecting and visualizing conceptual subdomains (particular themes or general thematic areas). It allows us to quantify and visualize...

The popular h-index used to measure scientific output can be described in terms of a pool of evaluated objects (the papers), a quality function on the evaluated objects (the number of citations received by each paper) and a sentencing line crossing the origin, whose intersection with the graph...

The time dependence of the h-index is analyzed by considering the average behavior of h as a function of the academic age AA for about 1400 Italian physicists, with career lengths spanning from 3 to 46 years. The individual h-index is strongly correlated with the square root of the total...

We axiomatize the well-known Hirsch index (h-index), which evaluates researcher productivity and impact on a field, and formalize a new axiom called head-independence. Under head-independence, a decrease, to some extent, in the number of citations of “frequently cited papers” has no effect...

A theoretical model of the dependence of Hirsch-type indices on the number of publications and the average citation rate is tested successfully on empirical samples of journal h-indices.

Across the various scientific domains, significant differences occur with respect to research publishing formats, frequencies and citing practices, the nature and organisation of research and the number and impact of a given domain's academic journals. Consequently, differences occur in the...

The aim of this brief communication is to reply to a letter by Kosmulski (Journal of Informetrics 6(3):368–369, 2012), which criticizes a recent indicator called “success-index”. The most interesting features of this indicator, presented in Franceschini et al. (Scientometrics, in press),...