Improving fairness of H-index: RA-index

H-index has been widely used as one of the bibliometric measurement methods for researchers’ performance. On the other hand, H-index has been unfair for figuring authors that have high number of citations but fewer number of papers (perfectionist researcher) and researchers that have many papers but fewer citations (productive researcher). The main objective of this article is to improve H-index for accommodating and calculating perfectionist and productive researchers’ impact based on Jain’s Fairness Index algorithm and Lotka’s Law. For improving H-index by RA-index is proposed. To prove the proposed method, 1,710 citation data sets of top cited researchers from Scopus based on author names list from Webometrics site are used. Fairness index of the RA-index has the average of 91 per cent, which is higher than the fairness of H-Index 80 per cent has been found.