WL-Index: Leveraging Citation Mention Number to Quantify an Individual's Scientific Impact

A number of bibliometric indices have been developed to evaluate an individual's scientific impact, and the most popular are the h-index and its variants. However, existing bibliometric indices are computed based on the number of citations received by each article, but they do not consider the frequency with which individual citations are mentioned in an article. We use citation mention to denote a unique occurrence of a cited reference mentioned in the citing article, and thus some citations may have more than one mention in an article. According to our analysis of the ACL Anthology Network corpus in the natural language processing field, more than 40% of cited references have been mentioned twice or in corresponding citing articles. We argue that citation mention is a preferable for representing the citation relationships between articles, that is, a reference article mentioned m times in the citing article will be considered to have received m citations, rather than one citation. Based on this assumption, we revise the h-index and propose a new bibliometric index, the WL-index, to evaluation an individual's scientific impact. According to our empirical analysis, the proposed WL-index more accurately discriminates between program committee chairs of reputable conferences and ordinary authors.