A New Bw Index for Quantifying Scholars' Research Influence

The growing importance of measuring and evaluating academic performance in academic hiring, promotions, funding allocation, and resource distribution has fueled the demand for better metrics. Traditional ranking indicators, such as publication count and citation-based indices, often fail to capture for the interdisciplinary influence and qualitative dimensions of research impact. These shortcomings highlight the need for more comprehensive evaluation metrics. The current study introduces a novel BW Index, which integrates both quantitative and qualitative aspects of researcher contributions aiming to provide a more balanced and comprehensive evaluation of scholarly impact. For evaluating the effectiveness of proposed index, a comparative analysis was conducted on 200 researchers' profiles of Monash University Australia calculating both the h-index and the proposed BW Index. The results of study indicate that researchers with identical h-index exhibit significant variation in BW Index values ranging from 10 to 55, demonstrating its ability to distinguish research impact beyond citation counts. Furthermore, for researchers with an h-index of 20, the BW Index ranges from 20 to 82, reflecting an increase in differentiation compared to traditional h index. These findings highlight the BW Index as a more nuanced and equitable measure of academic influence, offering a refined approach to researcher evaluation and addresses the limitations of traditional metrics.