A new tool co-developed by IUNI Director Santo Fortunato and IUNI affiliate Filippo Radicchi calculates a new metric the two scholars developed with Şirag Erkol (Ph.D. candidate in Informatics, Center for Complex Networks and Systems Research, Indiana University) and Satyaki Sikdar (Postdoctoral Fellow, Luddy School of Informatics, Computing and Engineering, Indiana University).
The new measure and tool, E-index, emerges from a paper Erkol, Sikdar, Radicchi and Fortunato collaborated on, Consistency pays off in science, that takes a look at what publication strategy offers more chances of success: publishing lots of papers, producing a few hit papers — or something in between.
The pace in the number of scientific papers published over the past several years and decades has grown exponentially. This explosion has led to a discussion on the interplay between how much output a scholar produces versus how well that work is received by their field.
The article takes a look at these issues by studying the scientific output portfolios of laureates of the Nobel Prize. A comparative analysis of several existing citation-based indicators of individual impact suggests that the best path to success may rely on consistently producing high-quality work. Such a pattern is especially rewarded by a new metric, the E-index, which identifies excellence better than state-of-the-art measures.
The E-index Portal allows users to compute metrics of individual scientific excellence, including your own E-index. You can find which percentile you occupy in your field (or fields). You can also compare yourself with someone else. The portal uses data from OpenAlex. (Although that data often includes multiple duplicates of an author, one entry will usually hold most of the publications.)