IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/bla/jamist/v62y2011i11p2290-2293.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

What does the g‐index really measure?

Author

Listed:
  • Alex De Visscher

Abstract

It was argued recently that the g‐index is a measure of a researcher's specific impact (i.e., impact per paper) as much as it is a measure of overall impact. While this is true for the productive “core” of publications, it can be argued that the g‐index does not differ from the square root of the total number of citations in a bibliometrically meaningful way when the entire publication list is considered. The R‐index also has a tendency to follow total impact, leaving only the A‐index as a true measure of specific impact. The main difference between the g‐index and the h‐index is that the former penalizes consistency of impact whereas the latter rewards such consistency. It is concluded that the h‐index is a better bibliometric tool than is the g‐index, and that the square root of the total number of citations is a convenient measure of a researcher's overall impact.

Suggested Citation

  • Alex De Visscher, 2011. "What does the g‐index really measure?," Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 62(11), pages 2290-2293, November.
    • Handle: RePEc:bla:jamist:v:62:y:2011:i:11:p:2290-2293
    DOI: 10.1002/asi.21621
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.21621
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1002/asi.21621?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Żogała-Siudem, Barbara & Cena, Anna & Siudem, Grzegorz & Gagolewski, Marek, 2023. "Interpretable reparameterisations of citation models," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 17(1).

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:bla:jamist:v:62:y:2011:i:11:p:2290-2293. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Wiley Content Delivery (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.asis.org .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.