Zhou Tang and I have submitted a paper, my first in the area of scientometrics, to Quantitative Science Studies. I may be biased, but I feel this idea has potential.

The most commonly used publication metrics for individual researchers are the the total number of publications, the total number of citations, and Hirsch’s -index. Each of these  increases throughout a researcher’s career, making it less suitable for evaluation of junior researchers or assessing recent impact.  We aim to study non-cumulative measures that answer the question “in terms of citation impact, what have you done lately?”

We single out six measures from the rather sparse literature, including Hirsch’s -index, a time-scaled version of the -index. We introduce new measures based on the idea of “citation acceleration”. After presenting several axioms for non-cumulative measures, we conclude that one of our new measures has much better theoretical justification. We present a small-scale study of its performance on real data and conclude that it shows substantial promise for future use.