This metric is shown as h-index and Hirsch a=y.yy, m=z.zz
in the output.Publish or Perish is a software program that retrieves and analyzes academic citations. It currently uses Google Scholar to obtain the raw citations, then analyzes these and presents the following statistics:
The results are available on-screen and can also be copied to the Windows clipboard (for pasting into other applications) or saved to a text file (for future reference or further analysis).
See Using Publish or Perish for instructions to operate the program.
The h-index was proposed by J.E. Hirsch in his paper An index to quantify an individual's scientific research output, arXiv:physics/0508025 v5 29 Sep 2005. It is defined as follows:
A scientist has index h if h of his/her Np papers have at least h citations each, and the other (Np-h) papers have no more than h citations each.
It aims to measure the cumulative impact of a researcher's output by looking at the amount of citation his/her work has received. Publish or Perish calculates and displays the h index proper, its associated proportionality constant a (from Nc,tot = ah2), and the rate parameter m (from h ~ mn, where n is the number of years since the first publication).
The properties of the h-index have been analyzed in various papers; see for example Leo Egghe and Ronald Rousseau: An informetric model for the Hirsch-index, Scientometrics, Vol. 69, No. 1 (2006), pp. 121-129.
This metric is shown as h-index and Hirsch a=y.yy, m=z.zz
in the output.
The g-index was proposed by Leo Egghe in his paper Theory and practice of the g-index, Scientometrics, Vol. 69, No 1 (2006), pp. 131-152. It is defined as follows:
[Given a set of articles] ranked in decreasing order of the number of citations that they received, the g-index is the (unique) largest number such that the top g articles received (together) at least g2 citations.
It aims to improve on the h-index by giving more weight to highly-cited articles.
This metric is shown as g-index in the output.
The Contemporary h-index was proposed by Antonis Sidiropoulos, Dimitrios Katsaros, and Yannis Manolopoulos in their paper Generalized h-index for disclosing latent facts in citation networks, arXiv:cs.DL/0607066 v1 13 Jul 2006.
It adds an age-related weighting to each cited article, giving (by default; this depends on the parametrization) less weight to older articles. The weighting is parametrized; the Publish or Perish implementation uses gamma=4 and delta=1, like the authors did for their experiments. This means that for an article published during the current year, its citations account four times. For an article published 4 years ago, its citations account only one time. For an article published 6 years ago, its citations account 4/6 times, and so on.
This metric is shown as hc-index and ac=y.yy in the output.
The age-weighted citation rate was inspired by Bihui Jin's note The AR-index: complementing the h-index, ISSI Newsletter, 2007, 3(1), p. 6.
The AWCR measures the number of citations to an entire body of work, adjusted for the age of each individual paper. It is an age-weighted citation rate, where the number of citations to a given paper is divided by the age of that paper. Jin defines the AR-index as the square root of the sum of all age-weighted citation counts over all papers that contribute to the h-index. However, in the Publish or Perish implementation we sum over all papers instead, because we feel that this represents the impact of the total body of work more accurately. (In particular, it allows younger and as yet less cited papers to contribute to the AWCR, even though they may not yet contribute to the h-index.)
The AW-index is defined as the square root of the AWCR to allow comparison with the h-index; it approximates the h-index if the (average) citation rate remains more or less constant over the years.
These metrics are shown as AWCR and AW-index in the output.
The Individual h-index was proposed by Pablo D. Batista, Monica G. Campiteli, Osame Kinouchi, and Alexandre S. Martinez in their paper Is it possible to compare researchers with different scientific interests?, Scientometrics, Vol 68, No. 1 (2006), pp. 179-189.
It divides the standard h-index by the average number of authors in the articles that contribute to the h-index, in order to reduce the effects of co-authorship; the resulting index is called hI.
Publish or Perish also implements an alternative individual h-index, hI,norm, that takes a different approach: instead of dividing the total h-index, it first normalizes the number of citations for each paper by dividing the number of citations by the number of authors for that paper, then calculates hI,norm as the h-index of the normalized citation counts. This approach is much more fine-grained than Batista et al.'s; we believe that it more accurately accounts for any co-authorship effects that might be present and that it is a better approximation of the per-author impact, which is what the original h-index set out to provide.
These metrics are shown as hI-index (Batista et al.'s) and hI,norm
(PoP's) in the output.