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I've seen plenty of places where authors are rated on how much they publish and are cited. There are also metrics like the h-index and i10-index that try and assign a number to the relative quality of a given researcher (for better or worse). But, is there anything similar for individual articles?

It seems to me that people would want an easy way to see if a piece of research has been reproduced or not, peer reviewed for quality of methods and/or analysis, retracted, cited by other papers, the quality of the papers cited, etc. I would think that this would be an extremely useful tool to help people see if the paper they are reading, and potentially citing, is a quality paper or not. However, I've never seen or heard of anything that does this.

So, is there a service or metric out there that has something like an h-value on a per article basis rather than a per author basis?

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    1. h-value have nothing to do with the fact if the research is verified or not. I.e., a wrong proof of some theorem can be cited multiple times for one reason or another. (fun fact: the highest ever cited paper in physics by Einstein, Podolsky, Rosen is actually making a wrong statement). 2. The number of citations per paper, or a number of citations excluding the self-citations is the only parameter which is easily measurable. The only variation I see is to include the quality of citations (from which authors / journals they come). But IMO, just the number of citations is good enough...
    – sashkello
    Dec 22, 2013 at 21:54
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    This question does not appear to be about statistics within the scope defined in the help center.
    – gung
    Dec 22, 2013 at 21:54
  • If a paper is published in a scientific journal, it passed peer-review. It is standard to have citation counts associated w/ individual papers; it is from those that h, etc, are calculated.
    – gung
    Dec 22, 2013 at 21:58
  • Google Scholar and many other similar services can give you their counts of how many times an article has been cited, but there's no metric for how "good" it is.
    – BrenBarn
    Dec 24, 2013 at 6:44

1 Answer 1

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Rating the quality of a paper is extremely difficult. Journal impact factors tell you little about the quality of individual papers. Citation counts are also misleading since papers that are wrong tend to get lots of citations. There is really no substitute for reading and making your own decisions.

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