A New Index To Evaluate The Researcher’s Impact Based On A Series Points On The Citation Curve

To evaluate a researcher‘s academic impact properly is an important part of the bibliometrics. We know now whatever getting an academic award or applying for a project and so on, those which are concerned with a researcher‘s personal interests, are always decided by his or her academic impact. And today we are inclined to evaluate the researcher‘s impact by using a bibliometric index. So a qualified index not only can help an institute value the researcher more properly, but also can encourage the research to do their study in a right way, which means a lot when it comes to create a healthy academic environment.At first, this paper give a short version of the current development condition of bibliometrics both in and out of the country. Then it focuses on the bibliometric index, especially the h-index and its variants, and elaborates their definitions, advantages and disadvantages. And then we come up with a new index called the hc-index by contracting the information from the citation curve and merging those information into one single index which in this case is the hc-index.To testify the efficiency of the hc-index when it comes to value a researcher, we perform an imperial study. We choose 50 Spanish psychiatrists whose h-index are on the top 50 to be the subjects of this paper. First we compare the rankings based on the h-index and the hc-index, and it turns out the hc-index can do better when there is a need to distinguish two different researchers‘impact. And at the same time, the hc-index‘s highly related to the h-index gives a solid theoretical support for the hc-index‘s application. After this work, we use the same way used before to compare the rankings based on different nine indexes, including the h-index and the hc-index. The study shows that the number of papers published and the mean number of citations per paper are relatively more inefficiency when it comes to value a researcher‘s impact than the other seven indexes. And because of the hc-index‘s good performance on the entropy of information and correlations between the other indexes, we consider it a proper index to evaluate a researcher‘s academic impact.