title: An absolute index (Ab-index) to measure a researcher's useful contributions and productivity.
abstract: Bibliographic analysis has been a very powerful tool in evaluating the effective contributions of a researcher and determining his/her future research potential. The lack of an absolute quantification of the author's scientific contributions by the existing measurement system hampers the decision-making process. In this paper, a new metric system, Absolute index (Ab-index), has been proposed that allows a more objective comparison of the contributions of a researcher. The Ab-index takes into account the impact of research findings while keeping in mind the physical and intellectual contributions of the author(s) in accomplishing the task. The Ab-index and h-index were calculated for 10 highly cited geneticists and molecular biologist and 10 young researchers of biological sciences and compared for their relationship to the researchers input as a primary author. This is the first report of a measuring method clarifying the contributions of the first author, corresponding author, and other co-authors and the sharing of credit in a logical ratio. A java application has been developed for the easy calculation of the Ab-index. It can be used as a yardstick for comparing the credibility of different scientists competing for the same resources while the Productivity index (Pr-index), which is the rate of change in the Ab-index per year, can be used for comparing scientists of different age groups. The Ab-index has clear advantage over other popular metric systems in comparing scientific credibility of young scientists. The sum of the Ab-indices earned by individual researchers of an institute per year can be referred to as Pr-index of the institute.
authors.affiliation: C4 Rice Centre, International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), Metro Manila, Philippines.
authors.forename: Akshaya Kumar
authors.initials: AK
authors.lastname: Biswal
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D001319:Authorship; D015706:Bibliometrics; D035843:Biomedical Research / Q000379:methods / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D004526:Efficiency; D006801:Humans; D012108:Research Personnel / Q000592:standards / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D013647:Task Performance and Analysis