$C^3$-index: Revisiting Authors' Performance Measure

Abstract

Author performance indices (such as h-index and its variants) fail to resolve ties while ranking authors with low index values (majority in number) which includes the young researchers. In this work we leverage the citations as well as collaboration profile of an author in a novel way using a weighted multi-layered network and propose a variant of page-rank algorithm to obtain a new author performance measure, $C^3$-index. Experiments on a massive publication dataset reveal several interesting characteristics of our metric: (i) we observe that $C^3$-index is consistent over time, (ii) $C^3$-index has high potential to break ties among low rank authors, (iii) $C^3$-index can effectively be used to predict future achievers at the early stage of their career.