Scientometrics

Scientometric indicators include quantitative and qualitative evaluation indicators of researchers scientific output, which can be used as a basis for evaluation, ranking, as well as research policies, designing development roadmaps and achieving scientific authority. Citation indices are one of the most common and reliable scientometric indices due to their attention to the quality of scientific productions and their high efficiency in citation analysis. The most important scientometric indicators that are formed based on citation analysis are:

- H-Index: The H-Index (h) of a researcher includes h number of his articles, each of which has been cited at least h times.

- M-Index: The h-index of each researcher depends on the length of his research activity. Because over time, the number of articles and citations to it increases. For this reason, M index was introduced to compare researchers in different stages of their activity. This parameter is obtained as a result of dividing the H index of each researcher by his academic age. Scientific age means the number of years that have passed since the publication of his first article.

- G-Index: Another weakness of H-Index is ignoring highly cited articles. In 2006, the G index was introduced to complete the function of the h index and eliminate this weakness. In this index, unlike the H index, more weight is given to articles that are cited the most. According to the definition of the index, g is equal to the highest rank in the descending list of articles in such a way that the first article g has received at least g2 citations and the total number of citations of articles up to g is greater than or equal to g2. With attention and precision in how to calculate G-Index, we find that G-Index will never be lower than H-Index. This index was proposed to highlight highly cited articles and modify the H index, and it is the highest number of articles that have been cited by a factor of 2 or more.

- Impact factor (IF): The impact factor of a journal is the ratio between received citations and published articles during a period of time. A two-year period is usually considered for review.