g-index

[1] The index is calculated based on the distribution of citations received by a given researcher's publications, such that given a set of articles ranked in decreasing order of the number of citations that they received, the g-index is the unique largest number such that the top g articles received together at least g2 citations.

It can be equivalently defined as the largest number n of highly cited articles for which the average number of citations is at least n. This is in fact a rewriting of the definition as The g-index is an alternative for the older h-index.

[1] The g-index often separates authors based on citations to a greater extent compared to the h-index.

However, unlike the h-index, the g-index saturates whenever the average number of citations for all publications exceeds the total number of publications; the way it is defined, the g-index is not adapted to this situation.

Like the h-index, the g-index is a natural number and thus lacks in discriminatory power.

An example of a g -index (the raw citation data, plotted with stars, allows the h -index to also be extracted for comparison).