Self-Citations and scientific evaluation: Leadership, influence, and performance

The hα index was recently proposed by Hirsch (2019) to measure the degree of scientific leadership. However, as discussed in recent literature, this measure has important shortcomings. We introduce an alternative approach that does not suffer from these limitations. It uses self-citations as a source of information, makes the evaluation at the paper-level, and centers the analysis on the new and broader concept of scientific influence. In each...