Evaluating the Productivity of Researchers and their Communities: The RP-Index and the CP-Index

Abstract

While the h-Index and the g-Index (as the major indices for quantifying the academic performance of researchers) take into consideration the citation count of publications, some other important indicators of research output (i.e. the number of authors per paper, lead author, year of publication) are omitted. Those indicators have to be considered in order to evaluate the productivity of researchers comprehensively. This paper analyzes the different indicators and proposes two new indices, the RP-Index and the CP-Index. The RP-Index evaluates the productivity of a researcher and the CP-Index evaluates the productivity of a group of researchers. After showing how these new indices can be applied and how they compare to the existing ones, an assessment of the two new indices is given.