Is the h-index Applicable and Sufficient to Assess Research Groups?

A myriad of indexes has been proposed to assess the productivity of scientific research. These indexes are useful for several management decisions, such as career development and financial support for scientific research. In the last two decades, several works have proposed indexes to measure how productive and relevant a researcher's work has been. Some of these indexes aim to assess an individual researcher and/or research groups by applying the same formula for both situations; in several cases, such a strategy is not straightforward. This paper aims to analyze the applicability of research-productivity indexes to assess research groups. We appraised several works that applied the h-index for research groups, identifying the different ways that this procedure has been used. Furthermore, we discussed the opportunities to expand these metrics in a fairer way to evaluate quantitative and qualitative aspects in research groups. By means of a literature review on these indexes, we proposed an approach to select and aggregate scientific papers for assessing research groups. Finally, the results obtained through the proposed approach for the tested example scenario are quite promising compared to baseline approaches.

Automated summary

This paper analyzes the applicability of research-productivity indexes to assess research groups and proposes a new approach to select and aggregate scientific papers for evaluating research teams. Promising results are obtained through the application of this approach in a test scenario.