Mathematical theory of the h- and g-index in case of fractional counting of authorship

This article studies the h-index (Hirsch index) and the g-index of authors, in case one counts authorship of the cited articles in a fractional way. There are two ways to do this: One counts the citations to these papers in a fractional way or one counts the ranks of the papers in a fractional way as credit for an author. In both cases, we define the fractional h- and g-indexes, and we present inequalities (both upper and lower bounds) between these fractional h- and g-indexes and their corresponding unweighted values (also involving, of course, the coauthorship distribution). Wherever applicable, examples and counterexamples are provided. In a concrete example (the publication citation list of the present author), we make explicit calculations of these fractional h- and g-indexes and show that they are not very different from the unweighted ones. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.