Based on an idea by Kosmulski, Franceschini et al. (2012, Scientometrics 92(3), 621–641) propose to classify a publication as “successful” when it receives more citations than a specific comparison term (CT). In the intention of the authors CT should be a suitable estimate of the number of...

The aim of this brief communication is to reply to a letter by Kosmulski (Journal of Informetrics 6(3):368–369, 2012), which criticizes a recent indicator called “success-index”. The most interesting features of this indicator, presented in Franceschini et al. (Scientometrics, in press),...

This paper introduces the Hirsch spectrum (h-spectrum) for analyzing the academic reputation of a scientific journal. h-Spectrum is a novel tool based on the Hirsch (h) index. It is easy to construct: considering a specific journal in a specific interval of time, h-spectrum is defined as the...

In a recent work by Anderson, Hankin, and Killworth (2008), Ferrers diagrams and Durfee squares are used to represent the scientific output of a scientist and construct a new h-based bibliometric indicator, the tapered h-index (hT). In the first part of this paper we examine hT, identifying its...

Evaluating the scientific output of researchers, research institutions, academic departments and even universities is a challenging issue. To do this, bibliometric indicators are helpful tools, more and more familiar to research and governmental institutions.

This paper proposes an empirical analysis of several scientists based on their time regularity, defined as the ability of generating an active and stable research output over time, in terms of both quantity/publications and impact/citations. In particular, we empirically analyse three recent...

A recent paper (Canavero et al., 2014. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, doi:10.1109/TPC.2013.2255935) performed a bibliometric analysis of an extensive set of scientific journals within the Engineering field, published by IEEE (Institute of Electrical and...

Omitted citations – i.e., missing links between a cited paper and the corresponding citing papers – are the main consequence of several bibliometric database errors.