title: The h'-index, effectively improving the h-index based on the citation distribution.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  Although being a simple and effective index that has been widely used to evaluate academic output of scientists, the h-index suffers from drawbacks. One critical disadvantage is that only h-squared citations can be inferred from the h-index, which completely ignores excess and h-tail citations, leading to unfair and inaccurate evaluations in many cases.
  
  
  RESULTS
  To solve this problem, I propose the h'-index, in which h-squared, excess and h-tail citations are all considered. Based on the citation data of the 100 most prolific economists, comparing to h-index, the h'-index shows better correlation with indices of total-citation number and citations per publication, which, although relatively reliable and widely used, do not carry the information of the citation distribution. In contrast, the h'-index possesses the ability to discriminate the shapes of citation distributions, thus leading to more accurate evaluation.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  The h'-index improves the h-index, as well as indices of total-citation number and citations per publication, by possessing the ability to discriminate shapes of citation distribution, thus making the h'-index a better single-number index for evaluating scientific output in a way that is fairer and more reasonable.
authors.affiliation: Department of Physics, Tianjin University, Tianjin, China. ctzhang@tju.edu.cn
authors.forename: Chun-Ting
authors.initials: CT
authors.lastname: Zhang
mesh_terms: D004526:Efficiency; D006801:Humans; D015233:Models, Statistical; D011642:Publications / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D012108:Research Personnel
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