Goodbye h -Index, Welcome c -Score

Despite its well-known flaws, the crude h -index is still the most used indicator of individual researcher’s performance using citation scores. The h -index is sensitive to career duration and specialty disparities and favours self-citation, fake authorship, and wrong credit allocation, especially in multi-authored papers. Some modifications of the h -index have been proposed to mitigate these weaknesses, but they are poorly used, and the fundamental deficiencies persist. The c -score is a composite index that is available with and without self-citations, normalizes the number of citations by considering the number of authors (h m -index), and takes into account first, single, and last authorship. This approach provides a more realistic measure of the impact of each individual researcher based on raw citations and should be officially adopted for individual researcher’s evaluation. Since 2019, a ranking—known as the Stanford ranking—using the c -score is updated yearly for the 100,000 most-cited researchers and those in the upper 2% of their respective specialties.