We introduce a new scientometric index, inspired by the Lobby-Hirsch index from complex networks literature, that we call K index. The K index grows with the impact of the citing papers and can be thought of as a measure of scientific innovation and recognition. We show that the K-index can be easily computed from the Web of Science platform and presents several advantages over other bibliometric indexes. The K index is robust to self-citations, is not limited by the total number of papers published by a researcher and is able to distinguish in a consistent way researchers that have the same h index but different scientific impacts -- Einstein and Hirsch, for example. The K index successfully detects a known case of inflated numbers for papers, citations and h index due to scientific career fraud. Finally, we show that, in a sample of twenty-eight physics Nobel laureates and twenty-eight highly cited non-Nobel-laureate physicists, the K index correlates better to the achievement of scientific prizes than the number of papers, citations, citations per paper, citing articles and the h index. Clustering researchers in a K versus h plot reveals interesting patterns and outliers that suggest that these two indexes are complementary.
['Osame Kinouchi', 'Leonardo Humberto Soares', 'George C. Cardoso']
A simple impact index for scientific innovation and recognition