Abstract

The h-index of Scopus is used as an important and practical instrument in analyzing the scientific level of researchers. In this research, 6 effective items (including author’s order, quality of publication source, quality of citation source, type of citation, research scopes of the authors and the regular scope of citation source) were considered in order to increase the accuracy and equity of research and also the optimization of scientometrics. In order to find the actual impact of each item, a relation with a default coefficient was considered, and all effective items were presented after evaluating the influence of them on the desired coefficients. Here, the introduced effective factors were separately investigated for 20 Iranian authors who are randomly selected. The analysis of the results showed that by applying the effective factors, the h-index of authors was obtained on the basis of real and scientific criteria; thus, the mean of all effective factors is introduced as modified h-index. Among considered authors, the lowest reduction in h-index was 10.67 and the highest reduction was 37.25 (SD was 6.5). This reduction was obtained in comparison with their h-index of Scopus, and it demonstrates that the authors, who have less reduction in their h-index value, have more scientific and honest approach to research. © 2018, Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature.