BACKGROUND: there has been an increasing interest and need in evaluating the quality of scientific papers written by researchers. Therefore, the most important measurements used are the number of citations, the average number of citations per article published in indexed journals and the H-index. Those bibliometric indicators present, however, limitations when assessing the potential impact of the publications of a given researcher, particularly among the most productive ones. OBJECTIVE: To propose and to demonstrate the use of a new scienciometric strategy - the H-index of the citing articles-, that allow to better discriminate the impact of a given researcher to the body of knowledge in the respective research area. METHODS: Research data - Web of Science - from 13 of the most productive Brazilian PhD researchers in the field of exercise and sport sciences were analyzed, including: number of publications, number of citations, average number of citations per article, H-index and the proposed H-index of citing articles (the H-index extracted from the ranking of articles that cited the papers published by a given researcher). Data from four other researchers - Brazilian and foreign - were used as reference for comparisons. RESULTS: The researcher's H-index and the H-index of the citing articles were associated (r=.92; p>.01). However, when the six most productive authors were analyzed with H-index above 7, the association between the two indexes disappears (r=.35; p=.49). CONCLUSIONS: The H-index of the citing articles can be useful to discriminate the scientific production of authors with a high number of published papers. It is suggested that this algorithm should be adopted by Brazilian and foreign financing and scientific production evaluation agencies.
scienciometry; citations; research; evaluation; impact factor
