The Community Index: A More Comprehensive Approach to Assessing Scholarly Impact

The h index is a widely recognized metric for assessing the research impact of scholars, defined as the maximum value h such that the scholar has published h papers each cited at least h times. While it has proven useful measuring individual scholarly productivity and citation impact, the h index has limitations, such as an inability to account for interdisciplinary collaboration or demographic differences in citation patterns. Moreover, it is sometimes mistakenly treated as a measure of research quality, even though it only reflects how often work has been cited. While metric based evaluations of research have grown in importance in some areas of academia, such as medicine, these evaluations fail to consider other important aspects of intellectual work, such as representational and epistemic diversity in research. In this article, we propose a new metric called the c index, or the community index, which combines multiple dimensions of scholarly impact. This is important because a plurality of perspectives and lived experiences within author teams can promote epistemological reflection and humility as part of the creation and validation of scientific knowledge. The c index is a means of accounting for the often global, and increasingly interdisciplinary nature of contemporary research, in particular, the data that is collected, curated and analyzed in the process of scientific inquiry. While the c index provides a means of quantifying diversity within research teams, diversity is integral to the advancement of scientific excellence and should be actively fostered through formal recognition and valuation. We herein describe the mathematical foundation of the c index and demonstrate its potential to provide a more comprehensive representation and more multidimensional assessment of scientific contributions of research impact as compared to the h index.