S-Index: A New Measure to Evaluate the Scientific Impact of Scholars

Abstract

During the last decade, several indicators were proposed to evaluate the scientific impact of an individual. One of the most popular indicators is the h-index. Although effective and simple, the h-index suffers from information loss and low resolution. To overcome these limitations, some scholars have proposed the g-index and EM-index but they consider only the citation count of high-cited articles, and the citation count of low-cited articles are completely ignored. Every article which has been cited at least once is important in the process of scientific evaluation and contains unique information about the scholars. To overcome this shortcoming, we have proposed the S-index in this paper. The S-index used the concept of two-sided h index, which considers all publication citations and obtains a single number for the scientific impact of an individual through a more balanced way. In order to illustrate the advantages of S-index over other indicators, we made an experimental analysis on 100 scholar's articles citation count. From the experimental results, we conclude that the S-index is a more balanced and fine-grained method to quantify the scientific impact of an individual.