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