Indexes for Evaluating Research Groups: Challenges and Opportunities

Several indexes have been proposed to evaluate the scientific research productivity. These indexes are useful for several management decisions, such as career development and distribution of financial capital to scientific researches. In the last two decades, several works have proposed indexes to measure how productive and relevant the work of a researcher is. Some of these indexes aim to be applicable to evaluate an individual researcher and/or groups of researchers, applying the same formula for both situations. However, in some cases, this application is not straightforward. In this work, we studied the main indexes used to evaluate productivity of scientific researchers, discuss their aspects and organize them according to their characteristics, by pointing up the variables that are used to compose each index. We also analyzed works that applied the h-index for a group of researchers, highlighting the different ways adopted for this application. Furthermore, we discussed the opportunities to expand these metrics in a fairer way to evaluate quantitative and qualitative aspects for groups of researchers. After a literature review of these indexes, we conclude that the h-index can be used in many ways to evaluate groups of scientific researchers. Hence, there are other challenges and opportunities in the proposal of indexes to evaluate these groups, such as performing experiments for smaller groups, evaluating social aspects and defining better ways for selecting articles to evaluate the research productivity of groups.