MDAI - A bibliometric index based on collaboration distances

The h-index by Hirsch[1] has recently earned a lot of popularity in bibliometrics, being echoed in Nature and implemented in the Web of Science bibliometric database. Previous indicators were the total number of papers or the total number of citations. Following the widely accepted idea that not all papers should count equally, the h-index counts only those papers that are significant enough according to their number of citations. However, as for qualifying the significance of citations, beyond excluding self-citations by recent proposals[2,3,4,5,6], the fact that not all citations should count equally has remained unaddressed, with the exception of [7]. The h-index can be described in terms of a pool of evaluated objects (papers), a quality function on the evaluated object (citations received by each paper) and a sentencing line crossing the origin (y = x). When the evaluated objects are ordered by descreasing quality, then the intersection of the sentencing line with the graph of the quality function yields the index value.