Variation in Citation Based Fractional Counting of Authorship

Abstract

Existing indexing methods do not consider the variation among number of citations received by publications of authors. In this paper, we propose variation in citation based fractional index  which not only consider the number of authors but also the variation factor in the number of citations.   Index considers the consistency in received citations of publication in addition to their quality and quantity for indexing. We have used Co-efficient of quartile deviation for calculation of variation in received citations because it is sensitive for both skewed and un-skewed data. We have used real world data for validation purpose and have used fractional h- and g-index as our baseline indexing methods. We compared the results of our proposed method with baseline methods and have analyzed that our intuition has clear impact on the authors indexing. Author on higher index in fractional index gets impacted by -index and its rank changes accordingly. Baseline methods do not considers variation factor and it is possible that authors with inconsistent citations receive high index value but if we use variation factor then our results will be more consistent. More the Co-efficient of quartile deviation lower the consistency and thus lower indexing.