Improving H-index using RA-index to Measure Researchers Impact, Case Study of Indonesian Researchers

Abstract

Advantages in the information technology development provide convenience for researchers to read a paper directly after the publication of the manuscript. The number of citations of a paper can be obtained within one to two years after the paper is published. H-index uses the combination of the number of citation and the number of papers published by a researcher to measure his/her papers impact. H-index has some disadvantages, i.e. the H-index did not accommodate the group of the productive and perfectionist researchers. Since the year 2015, the Indonesian Government provided some incentives for Indonesian researchers in order to improve the number of publications. Most researchers profile is characterized by a large number of papers, with a few citations. This paper proposed an improvement to the H-index method to increase the sensitivity of the H-index calculation. The data source of 8,500 Indonesian researchers is from Scopus. The proposed method is based on Jain's Fairness Index and Lotka’s Law, which we called the RA-index. This improved the RA-index used the weighting method mechanism based on " percent-contribution-indicated " (PCI) and " Equal 8Contribution (EC) method. Combination of the RA-index and the weighting method of author position is called RA-ma Index. It is expected that the proposed RA-ma index method can provide a positive contribution to measure the impact of Indonesian researchers.