Modifying h-index by allocating credit of multi-authored papers whose author names rank based on contribution

In the present work we introduce a modification of the h-index for multi-authored papers with contribution based author name ranking. The modified h-index is denoted by hmc-index. It employs the framework of the hm-index, which in turn is a straightforward modification of the Hirsch index, proposed by Schreiber. To retain the merit of requiring no additional rearrangement of papers in the hm-index and in order to overcome its shortage of benefiting secondary authors at the expense of primary authors, hmc-index uses combined credit allocation (CCA) to replace fractionalized counting in the hm-index. The hm-index is a special form of hmc-index and fits for papers with equally important authors or alphabetically ordered authorship. There is a possibility of an author of lower contribution to the whole scientific community obtaining a higher hmc-index. Rational hmc-index, denoted by hmcr-index, can avoid it. A fictitious example as a model case and two empirical cases are analyzed. The correlations of the hmcr-index with the h-index and its several variants considering multiple co-authorship are inspected with 30 researchers’ citation data. The results show that the hmcr-index is more reasonable for authors with different contributions. A researcher playing more important roles in significant work will obtain higher hmcr-index.