Scientific evaluation of the scholarly publications

Worthiness of any scientific journal is measured by the quality of the articles published in it. The Impact factor (IF) is one popular tool which analyses the quality of journal in terms of citations received by its published articles. It is usually assumed that journals with high IF carry meaningful, prominent, and quality research. Since IF does not assess a single contribution but the whole journal, the evaluation of research authors should not be influenced by the IF of the journal. The h index, g index, m quotient, c index are some other alternatives to judge the quality of an author. These address the shortcomings of IF viz. number of citations received by an author, active years of publication, length of academic career and citations received for recent articles. Quality being the most desirable aspect for evaluating an author's work over the active research phase, various indices has attempted to accommodate different possible variables. However, each index has its own merits and demerits. We review the available indices, find the fallacies and to correct these, hereby propose the Original Research Performance Index (ORPI) for evaluation of an author's original work which can also take care of the bias arising because of self-citations, gift authorship, inactive phase of research, and length of non-productive period in research.