The k-index: a fairer assessment of research quality and its societal and environmental impact

Le résumé fourni par la source

There is a growing necessity for establishing a fair and reliable research evaluation metric given that these assessments directly influence academic promotions and the allocation of research funds towards the most deserving projects with a significant societal and environmental impact. Currently, the h-index is the most widely used metric by academic institutions to evaluate the academic performance of researchers. It is claimed that the h-index is designed to quantify both the quantity and the quality of a scholar's publications by measuring the number of papers that have received enough citations. Such a claim is not true as it favours quantity over quality. In effect, the h-index is defined as follows: a researcher has an index of h if h of their papers has at least h citations each, and the rest of their papers have fewer than h citations. This means that if a researcher has only one paper with 1 million citations, then his h-index will still be equal to 1. On the other hand, if a researcher aspires to achieve an h-index of 100, then he/she must publish at least 100 papers. To address this issue, we propose a new fairer metric called the k-index to evaluate the academic performance of researchers. The k-index is defined as the sum of the h-index and the q-index; whereby the q-index is a term that is proportional to the total number of citations, accounting for the quality and impact of the publications. We highlight authors who have made highly influential contributions in renewable energy, often through a few seminal works, but may not have the long, continuous publication record that builds a high h-index. We show that their corresponding k-indexes reflect their academic records in a much fairer way.

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