American Economic Review
ISSN 0002-8282 (Print) | ISSN 1944-7981 (Online)
How to Count Citations If You Must
American Economic Review
vol. 106,
no. 9, September 2016
(pp. 2722–41)
(Complimentary)
Abstract
Citation indices are regularly used to inform critical decisions about promotion, tenure, and the allocation of billions of research dollars. Nevertheless, most indices (e.g., the h-index) are motivated by intuition and rules of thumb, resulting in undesirable conclusions. In contrast, five natural properties lead us to a unique new index, the Euclidean index, that avoids several shortcomings of the h-index and its successors. The Euclidean index is simply the Euclidean length of an individual's citation list. Two empirical tests suggest that the Euclidean index outperforms the h-index in practice.Citation
Perry, Motty, and Philip J. Reny. 2016. "How to Count Citations If You Must." American Economic Review 106 (9): 2722–41. DOI: 10.1257/aer.20140850Additional Materials
JEL Classification
- A14 Sociology of Economics
- C43 Index Numbers and Aggregation; leading indicators