Contextual Ψ -index and its estimate for contextual productivity assessment

Responsible use of indicators, especially productivity assessment indicators, is always a challenge for decision-makers, especially for funding purposes. For ‘thrust-area based funding’, contextual productivity assessment is necessary and overall productivity assessment indicators are not suitable. For instance, h -index, one of the most popular overall productivity assessment indicators is known to have many limitations that hinder its usage in contextual productivity assessment, even upon its contextualized usage. Can contextualized usage of other h -type indicators such as g and Ψ be effective in contextual productivity assessment? Since the computation of these indices are not as simple as that of h , how good are the estimators of these indices in providing a rough idea about productivity in a research context? These two problems are addressed in this work by determining the resolving power of h , g , and Ψ indices and their estimators. Estimation accuracy with respect to each indicator is also verified and Ψ -index is found to be the most suitable h -type indicator for the contextualized applications and its estimate is also found to be effective for garnering a rough idea about the productivity of actors within a research context.