A bibliometric index based on the collaboration distance between cited and citing authors

The popular h-index used to measure scientific output can be described in terms of a pool of evaluated objects (the papers), a quality function on the evaluated objects (the number of citations received by each paper) and a sentencing line crossing the origin, whose intersection with the graph of the quality function yields the index value (in the h-index this is a line with slope 1). Based on this abstraction, we present a new index, the c-index, in which the evaluated objects are the citations received by an author, a group of authors, a journal, etc., the quality function of a citation is the collaboration distance between the authors of the cited and the citing papers, and the sentencing line can take slopes between 0 and ∞. As a result, the new index counts only those citations which are significant enough, where significance is proportional to collaboration distance. Several advantages of the new c-index with respect to previous proposals are discussed.