Publication performance without calculations: an analysis based on the p-index

Bibliometric analysis is increasingly being used for key decisions in science and higher education. Regarding author-level performance evaluation, the p-index is a well-established measure. In this study, we propose the p′-index, which introduces a small adjustment in the p-index. Based on this transformation, we are able to build an index that is almost perfectly correlated with the p-index, but does not imply any form of calculations. The score of each researcher is presented in a table as on-line appendix. Only the total number of papers and citations are needed to obtain the final performance score. We discuss the application of this measure with a sample of economists belonging to the top 10 world universities.