The h-index in Australian Astronomy

The Hirsch (2005) h-index is now widely used as a metric to compare individual researchers. To evaluate it in the context of Australian Astronomy, the h-index for every member of the Astronomical Society of Australia (ASA) is found using NASA's Astrophysics Data System Bibliographic Services (ADS). Percentiles of the h-index distribution are detailed for a variety of categories of ASA members, including students. This enables a list of the top ten Australian researchers by h-index to be produced. These top researchers have h-index values in the range 53<h<77, which is less than that recently reported for the American Astronomical Society Membership. We suggest that membership of extremely large consortia such as SDSS may partially explain the difference. We further suggest that many student ASA members with large h-index values have probably already received their Ph.D.'s and need to upgrade their ASA membership status. To attempt to specify the h-index distribution relative to opportunity, we also detail the percentiles of its distribution by years since Ph.D. award date. This shows a steady increase in h-index with seniority, as can be expected.Comment: Accepted for publication in the Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australi

Further clarifications about the success-index

The aim of this brief communication is to reply to a letter by Kosmulski (Journal of Informetrics 6(3):368-369, 2012), which criticizes a recent indicator called "success-index". The most interesting features of this indicator, presented in Franceschini et al. (Scientometrics, in press), are: (i) allowing the selection of an "elite" subset from a set of publications and (ii) implementing the field-normalization at the level of an individual publication. We show that the Kosmulski's criticism is unfair and inappropriate, as it is the result of a misinterpretation of the indicato

Angular momentum projection of cranked Hartree-Fock states: Application to terminating bands in A~44 nuclei

We present the first systematic calculations based on the angular-momentum projection of cranked Slater determinants. We propose the Iy --> I scheme, by which one projects the angular momentum I from the 1D cranked state constrained to the average spin projection of =I. Calculations performed for the rotational band in 46Ti show that the AMP Iy --> I scheme offers a natural mechanism for correcting the cranking moment of inertia at low-spins and shifting the terminating state up by ~2 MeV, in accordance with data. We also apply this scheme to high-spin states near the band termination in A~44 nuclei, and compare results thereof with experimental data, shell-model calculations, and results of the approximate analytical symmetry-restoration method proposed previously.Comment: 9 RevTeX pages, 8 EPS figures, submitted to Physical Review

The w-index: A significant improvement of the h-index

I propose a new measure, the w-index, as a particularly simple and useful way to assess the integrated impact of a researcher's work, especially his or her excellent papers. The w-index can be defined as follows: If w of a researcher's papers have at least 10w citations each and the other papers have fewer than 10(w+1) citations, his/her w-index is w. It is a significant improvement of the h-index.Comment: 7 pages, 3 tables, small changes from v

Scientific impact evaluation and the effect of self-citations: mitigating the bias by discounting h-index

In this paper, we propose a measure to assess scientific impact that discounts self-citations and does not require any prior knowledge on the their distribution among publications. This index can be applied to both researchers and journals. In particular, we show that it fills the gap of h-index and similar measures that do not take into account the effect of self-citations for authors or journals impact evaluation. The paper provides with two real-world examples: in the former, we evaluate the research impact of the most productive scholars in Computer Science (according to DBLP); in the latter, we revisit the impact of the journals ranked in the 'Computer Science Applications' section of SCImago. We observe how self-citations, in many cases, affect the rankings obtained according to different measures (including h-index and ch-index), and show how the proposed measure mitigates this effect

Zeta potential in intact natural sandstones at elevated temperatures

Supporting data are included in PDF and CSV files; any additional data may be obtained from the corresponding author (e-mail: [email protected]). TOTAL is thanked for partial support of Jackson's Chair in Geological Fluid Mechanics and for supporting the activities of the TOTAL Laboratory for Reservoir Physics at Imperial College London where these experiments were conducted. The Editor thanks Andre Revil and Paul Glover for their assistance in evaluating this paper.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Reaction volume in aqueous solutions in problem solving

The volumes of reactions in solution are usually ignored in problem solving. Neglection of reaction volumes may lead to errors on the order of 1 % in the final result. Calculation of the volume of neutralization reaction based on the specific densities of solutions from chemical tables is demonstrated

The success-index: an alternative approach to the h-index for evaluating an individual's research output

Among the most recent bibliometric indicators for normalizing the differences among fields of science in terms of citation behaviour, Kosmulski (J Informetr 5(3):481-485, 2011) proposed the NSP (number of successful paper) index. According to the authors, NSP deserves much attention for its great simplicity and immediate meaning— equivalent to those of the h-index—while it has the disadvantage of being prone to manipulation and not very efficient in terms of statistical significance. In the first part of the paper, we introduce the success-index, aimed at reducing the NSP-index's limitations, although requiring more computing effort. Next, we present a detailed analysis of the success-index from the point of view of its operational properties and a comparison with the h-index's ones. Particularly interesting is the examination of the success-index scale of measurement, which is much richer than the h-index's. This makes success-index much more versatile for different types of analysis—e.g., (cross-field) comparisons of the scientific output of (1) individual researchers, (2) researchers with different seniority, (3) research institutions of different size, (4) scientific journals, etc

Synthesis and characterization of mesoporous silica: laboratory exercises for students

Synthesis and characterization of SBA-15 were proposed as a laboratory course: linked series of exercises for graduate students. The standard preparation method was modified to fit a typical schedule of students’ classes, that is, 3-hours units every second week. The properties of materials obtained by different students’ groups were compared with the properties of materials obtained by means of a standard method