Fairer citation based metrics

Abstract

I describe a simple modification which can be applied to any citation count based index (e.g. Hirsch’s h-index) quantifying a researcher’s publication output. The key idea behind the proposed approach is that the merit for the citations of a paper should be distributed amongst its authors according to their relative contributions. In addition to producing inherently fairer metrics I show that the proposed modification has the potential to normalize partially for the unfair effects of honorary authorship and thus discourage this practice.