Investigating scholarly indices and their contribution to recognition patterns among awarded and non-awarded researchers

The systematic evaluation and ranking of researchers in academia stand out as a challenging and tedious task. This task facilitates policymakers in making informed decisions regarding faculty promotions, awards and providing grants by identifying deserving individuals. Researchers have put forth a range of parameters for identification of the most impactful scholars. These parameters include the count of publications and citations, along with the h-index. However, considering the associated shortcomings of the h-index, the researchers have introduced several variations of the h-index. Fictitious scenarios and datasets will be utilized to evaluate the practical and real-world effectiveness of the proposed metrics. There is a gap that requires a thorough evaluation of the specific behavior of each index. The current study emphasizes the assessment of various indices using a comprehensive dataset that includes both award-winning and non-award-winning researchers. During the evaluation of each index, the retrieval of awardees was examined within the top 10% to top 100% of the ordered list for each respective index. In addition, we investigate the correlation among several indices and awarding societies. Our findings suggest that the A-index and normalized h-index can identify over 60% of award-winning researchers.