Fine tuning assessment of research: The hKA index.

ABSTRACT: During the past few years, institutions, scientific academies and government funding offices have adopted the h-index (Hirsch, 2005) as a parameter to measure research achievement. Several groups have discussed the limitations of the h-index (Costas and Bordons, 2007; Lawrence, 2007; Qiu et al., 2008). However, none of them have considered if the person being analyzed is a corresponding author or a coauthor of any published work. Being a corresponding author implies a distinctive role in the development of the reported research and is primarily liable for the information presented on the published work. Thus, any person with a largeenough collaboration network may have a high h-index value without being the main author of the work published.

I have derived a novel index, hKA, which estimates the h-index for the corresponding author. The use of this index can be extended to institutions and countries in order to compare their scientific productivity as it is currently being done by SCImago (SCImago, 2009). To validate this new index I analyzed the impact that Chile has had in the past 10 years in the field of “Astronomy and Astrophysics” as a country leading the research being published and as part of a global collaborative endeavor.