| The paper proposes two new simple indexes - the k and w indexes - to assess a scientist’s publications record based on citations. The two indexes are superior to the widely used h index (Hirsch, 2005), as they preserve all its valuable characteristics and try to overcome one of its known major shortcomings, i.e. that it uses only a fraction of the information contained in a scientist’s citations profile and, as a result, does not show a sufficiently fine ‘granularity’ (the h index is defined over the set of positive integers) to allow a fully satisfactory ranking of scientists. This problem is particularly acute in those disciplines, such as Economics, where scientific productivity and citation practices typically yield fewer citations per paper and, as a... |
