Agent-based model for the h-index - exact solution

Authored by Barbara Zogala-Siudem, Grzegorz Siudem, Anna Cena, Marek Gagolewski

Date Published: 2016

DOI: 10.1140/epjb/e2015-60757-1

Sponsors: European Union European Social Fund Interdisciplinary PhD Studies Program

Platforms: No platforms listed

Model Documentation: Other Narrative Mathematical description

Model Code URLs: Model code not found

Abstract

Hirsch's h-index is perhaps the most popular citation-based measure of scientific excellence. In 2013, Ionescu and Chopard proposed an agent-based model describing a process for generating publications and citations in an abstract scientific community {[}G. Ionescu, B. Chopard, Eur. Phys. J. B 86, 426 (2013)]. Within such a framework, one may simulate a scientist's activity, and - by extension-investigate the whole community of researchers. Even though the Ionescu and Chopard model predicts the h-index quite well, the authors provided a solution based solely on simulations. In this paper, we complete their results with exact, analytic formulas. What is more, by considering a simplified version of the Ionescu-Chopard model, we obtained a compact, easy to compute formula for the h-index. The derived approximate and exact solutions are investigated on a simulated and real-world data sets.
Tags
Preferential attachment Scientific impact Citation networks Hirsch-index