SP-index: The measure of the scientific production of researchers

Ability to assess how solidly one is participating in their research arena is a metric that is of interest to many persons in academia. Such assessment is not easily defined, and differences exist in terms of which metric is the most accurate. In reality, no single production metric exists that is easy to determine and acceptable by the entire scientific community. Here we propose the SP-index to quantify the scientific production of researchers, representing the product of the annual citation number by the accumulated impact factors of the journals whereby the papers appeared, divided by the annual number of published papers. This article discusses such a productivity measure and lends support for the development of unified citation metrics for use by all participating in science research or teaching. (C) 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.