W-Index: A Weighted Index for Evaluating Research Impact

Document pages: 8 pages

Abstract: Academic evaluations such as tenure promotion applications and society fellowship nominations rely heavily on bibliometric measures of each candidate’s research impact, including their research citations. This article first reviews existing evaluation criteria such as the h-index and q-most-citations, and then proposes a weighted w-index which minimizes shortcomings in existing single-number measures. The w-index consists of three factors—3 most cited first-author publications, 3 most cited publications as the corresponding last author, and 3 additional most cited publications as a co-author, but does not allow double counting of these publications.