A proposal for calculating weighted citations based on author rank

A recent article in EMBO reports by Bornmann & Daniel (2009) commented that “the h index […] is already regarded as the counterpart to the [impact factor]”. Indeed, the h index (Hirsch, 2005) is increasingly being used to evaluate the achievements of individual scientists, and major citation databases—such as the Scientific Citation Index (SCI; Thomson Reuters, New York, NY, USA) and Scopus (Elsevier, Amsterdam, The Netherlands)—already list by default the h index and total citations of every published scientist. However, this use confuses two distinct concepts: the citation number for a paper and that for an author, which differ because in a paper with multiple authors, their contributions are hardly equal and not all of them should take full credit. Nevertheless, routinely every author in a paper claims all citations as his or her own. Although the author rank is evident in the byline of a publication, it is invisible in citation numbers. For example, SCI and Scopus both disregard …