Rethinking Research Metrics: The Performance Impact Score (PIS) as a Novel Alternative to the H-index
Providing an objective ranking of scientists based on their merit is a rather challenging task. Numerous factors complicate this endeavor, raising difficult questions about how such evaluations should be conducted. The goal of the present paper is to introduce a new measure for evaluating researchers’ performance, the Performance Impact Score (PIS), which combines both productivity and research impact. In this study, I compared the PIS with h-index scores for 108 researchers at the University of Sarajevo. More specifically, I examined the overlap between the top 20 researchers according to the PIS and the top 20 researchers according to Web of Science, Google Scholar, and SCOPUS h-indexes. The concordance rate was 65% for Google Scholar and Web of Science, and 55% for SCOPUS. The analysis highlights the importance of considering both productivity and impact when evaluating researchers’ rankings. It is also evident that the top 20 researchers vary across different metrics. The results further demonstrate that creating a fair and just ranking system requires going beyond the data available in bibliometric databases, particularly in cases where researchers rank highly by one metric but perform poorly when evaluated by another.