A citation-based, author- and age-normalized, logarithmic index for evaluation of individual researchers independently of publication counts

The use of citation metrics for evaluation of individual researchers has dramatically increased over the last decade. However, currently existing indices either are based on misleading premises or are cumbersome to implement. This leads to poor assessment of researchers and creates dangerous trends in science, such as overproduction of low quality articles. Here we propose an index (namely, the L-index) that does not depend on the number of publications, accounts for different co-author contributions and age of publications, and scales from 0.0 to 9.9. Moreover, it can be calculated with the help of freely available software.