Certainty equivalent citation: a generalized class of citation indexes

Abstract

Citation indexes have attracted the interest of many researchers in the recent years. In this paper we propose a new class of citation indexes which is shown to generalize most of the citation indexes in the existing literature (h-, g-, f-, t-index). The class of indexes is obtained borrowing from the notion of ``certainty equivalent income'' or ``equally distributed equivalent income'' which has been largely implemented in the field of risk and inequality measurement. As a result citation orderings are shown to depend on a parameter of concentration/dispersion aversion capturing the value judgments of the decision-maker with respect to the distribution of citations. In order to verify the sensitivity of scientific productivity orderings with respect to concentration/dispersion aversion, an empirical application to a representative sample of Italian academic economists is presented