A multi-criteria approach to the h-index

Abstract The h-index was proposed in 2005, to objectively measure the impact and relevance of individuals' scientific output, based on their number of publications and citations. Since then, many works have studied the index's advantages and limitations, in various contexts and viewpoints. Still, we contribute to such a vast literature, by adopting a multi-criteria perspective to this matter. More precisely, we study the h-index in light of the fundamental axioms of coherence. We show that the number of publications and the number of total citations alone do not compose a coherent criteria family for the h-index, because it does not follow the axiom of exhaustivity. Thus, in this paper, we study examples from the literature to propose a suitable third criterion for the h-index, specifically, the form of the citation distribution among publications, which is less obvious than the other two. We verify that, with all three criteria, the criteria family that forms the h-index becomes coherent.

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