Abstract:
The h-index, as originally proposed (Hirsch, 2005), is a purely heuristic construction. Burrell (2013) showed that efforts to derive formulae from the mathematical framework of Lotkaian informetrics could lead to misleading results. On this note, we argue that a simple heuristic “thermodynamical” model can enable a better three-dimensional (3D) evaluation of the information production process leading to what we call the zynergy-index.
