Impact of h -index on author’s rankings: an improvement to the h -index for lower-ranked authors

In academia, the research performance of a faculty is evaluated based on the number of publications, the number of citations, and the impact of publication where one publishes. Most of the time h -index is widely used during the hiring process or the faculty performance evaluation. However, there is a significant impact of varying h -index among different databases on the author’s research evaluation. Here we analyze the publication records of 385 authors from Monash University (Australia) to investigate (i) the impact of different databases like Scopus and Web of Science on the ranking of authors within a discipline, and (ii) to complement the h -index, named h_c , by adding the weight of the highest cited paper to the h -index of the authors. The results show the positive impact of h_c on the lower-ranked authors ( h ≤ 10 ) in every discipline.