A Novel Pareto-VIKOR Index for Ranking Scientists’ Publication Impacts: A Case Study on Evolutionary Computation Researchers

Scientists' publication impacts ranking is an important topic in scientometrics which is performed based on various proposed criteria. One of the well-known indicators is h-index which evaluates researchers achievements based on number of citations. The h-index has utilized in many research data sources because of its appropriate properties, but similar to other assessment indicators, it has own disadvantages. hindex cannot give a fair comparison between junior and senior researches. There are two reasons for this unfair comparison: (1) h-index depends on the research period of scholars and (2) the number of received citations can be increased by time, even if researcher doesn't publish new papers, the h-index increases. Consequently, in addition to h-index, the number of the years of academic research (called the research period) is preferable to be considered as an independent indicator, which makes us able to have a more fair evaluation. So these two objectives, maximizing h-index and minimizing research period, can be considered as a multi-criteria comparison task to assess researchers. In this paper, we propose a strategy based on Pareto dominance ranking which uses dominance concept to obtain an order for researchers. In order to complete ranking between scientists in the same rank, a multi-criteria decision making measure called VIKOR is utilized. Therefore, a total ranking measure (P-V index) is obtained using Perto front concept and VIKOR measure. The proposed method is applied on 235 researchers who are conducting research on Evolutionary Computation (EC) topic. The h-index value and the research period of scholars are collected via Google Scholar service. P-V index obtains 26 Pareto ranks for all researchers and places six EC scientists on the first Pareto front.