American Economic Review Vol. 106 No. 9 2016

How To Count Citations If You Must

Motty Perry¹; Philip J. Reny²

¹ Department of Economics, University of Warwick, Coventry CV4 7AL (e-mail: ) · ² Department of Economics, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL 60637 (e-mail: )

Abstract

Citation indices are regularly used to inform critical decisions about promotion, tenure, and the allocation of billions of research dollars. Nevertheless, most indices (e.g., the h-index) are motivated by intuition and rules of thumb, resulting in undesirable conclusions. In contrast, five natural properties lead us to a unique new index, the Euclidean index, that avoids several shortcomings of the h-index and its successors. The Euclidean index is simply the Euclidean length of an individual's citation list. Two empirical tests suggest that the Euclidean index outperforms the h-index in practice.

DOI

10.1257/aer.20140850

Volume

106

Issue

9

Pages

2722-2741

Language

en

Sources

bibtex:phds-export.bib crossref openalex

Cite

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