New journal classification methods based on the global h-index

In this work we develop new journal classification methods based on the h-index. The introduction of the h-index for research evaluation has attracted much attention in the bibliometric study and research quality evaluation. The main purpose of using an h-index is to compare the index for different research units (e.g. researchers, journals, etc.) to differentiate their research performance. However the h-index is defined by only comparing citations counts of one's own publications, it is doubtful that the h index alone should be used for reliable comparisons among different research units, like researchers or journals. In this paper we propose a new global h-index (Gh-index), where the publications in the core are selected in comparison with all the publications of the units to be evaluated. Furthermore, we introduce some variants of the Gh-index to address the issue of discrimination power. We show that together with the original h-index, they can be used to evaluate and classify academic journals with some distinct advantages, in particular that they can produce an automatic classification into a number of categories without arbitrary cut-off points. We then carry out an empirical study for classification of operations research and management science (OR/MS) journals using this index, and compare it with other well-known journal ranking results such as the Association of Business Schools (ABS) journal Quality Guide and the Committee of Professors in OR (COPIOR) ranking lists. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.