TITLE:
W-Index: A Weighted Index for Evaluating Research Impact
AUTHORS:
Xindong Wu
KEYWORDS:
Research Impact, Bibliometric Measures, Citations, Publications, Author Rank
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Applied Sciences,
Vol.11 No.1,
January
29,
2021
ABSTRACT: Academic evaluations such as tenure/promotion applications and society fellowship nominations rely heavily on bibliometric measures of each candidate’s research impact, including their research citations. This article first reviews existing evaluation criteria such as the h-index and q-most-citations, and then proposes a weighted w-index which minimizes shortcomings in existing single-number measures. The w-index consists of three factors—3 most cited first-author publications, 3 most cited publications as the corresponding/last author, and 3 additional most cited publications as a co-author, but does not allow double counting of these publications.