Ockham’s index of citation impact

Abstract We demonstrate that by using a triple of simple numerical summaries: an author’s productivity, their overall impact, and single other bibliometric index aims to capture the shape citation distribution, we can reconstruct popular metrics impact with sufficient degree precision. thus conclude use many indices may be unnecessary – entities should not multiplied beyond necessity. Such study was possible thanks our new agent-based model (Siudem et al. in Proc Natl Acad Sci 117:13896–13900, 2020, 10.1073/pnas.2001064117 ), which only assumes citations are distributed according mixture rich-get-richer rule sheer chance, but also fits real data quite well. investigate have good discriminative power, measures easily predicted as functions ones, what implications research evaluation practice findings have.