The f Index: Quantifying the Impact of Coterminal Citations on Scientists' Ranking

Abstract

Designing fair and unbiased metrics to measure the "level of excellence" of a scientist is a very significant task because they recently also have been taken into account when deciding faculty promotions, when allocating funds, and so on. Despite criticism that such scientometric evaluators are confronted with, they do have their merits, and efforts should be spent to arm them with robustness and resistance to manipulation. This article alms at initiating the study of the coterminal citations-their existence and implications-and presents them as a generalization of self-citations and of co-citation; it also shows how they can be used to capture any manipulation attempts against scientometric indicators, and finally presents a new index, the f index, that takes into account the coterminal citations. The utility of the new index is validated using the academic production of a number of esteemed computer scientists. The results confirm that the new index can discriminate those individuals whose work penetrates many scientific communities.