A few days ago, coincidently on September 11, Times Higher Education published an article with a strange title, link above. Unfortunately, the article is behind a paywall. Fortunately, the same title allows that anyone can easily google the paper that is mentioned on it and find that it was recently published in Plos One titled "A fairer way to compare researchers at any career stage and in any discipline using open-access citation data"
The new Epsilon index just requires the information on:
• the number of citations acquired for the researcher’s top-cited paper
• the i10-index (number of articles with at least 10 citations)
• the h-index, and
• the year in which the researcher’s first peer-reviewed paper was published.
Still, and most unfortunately the paper says nothing about the serious problem of excessive self-citations nor about multiple co-authorship (the term kilo-author was introduced by biologist Zen Faulkes, to refer to papers that list over 1000 authors, a phenomenon with increasing frequency, CERN usually produces papers with more than 5000 authors) and the need for a fractionalized based methodology as it is used by the composite index suggested by Ioannidis et al also known as the Stanford University World Ranking of Scientists https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.3000384
