Evaluation of h-index,its variants and extensions based on publication age & citation intensity in civil engineering

The scientific community has proposed diversified set of parameters to rank researchers, including publications, citations, h-index, different variants and extensions of h-index. However, there is a debate in the scientific Community which index ranks authors in a better way. Current state-of-the-art depicts that these indices are evaluated on imaginary case scenarios and small datasets. Furthermore, these indices are evaluated on different datasets, making it difficult to grasp the contribution and importance of each index over the others. To analyze the individual behavior of each index, these indices should comprehensively be evaluated on some extensive data set. This study emphasizes on the scrutiny of h-index, some of its variants and extensions to rank authors. These indices are evaluated using a comprehensive data set of Civil Engineering field. For the evaluation of results obtained from these indices, first correlation was calculated among indices. There exists weak correlation between various indices, which demonstrates that the author’s rankings acquired from these indices are not identical. Secondly, occurrences of awardees are checked in all ranked lists. The prestigious award winners of four Civil Engineering societies are considered as a benchmark. In top 10% of ranked list, maximum 47% of the awardees were brought by Wu-index. Overall, none of the index succeeded in bringing 100% awardees to the top rankings. Highest number of awardees on top of all ranked lists are found to be from ACI (American Concrete Institute), which shows ACI might be dependent on these indices for its criterion to honor awards.