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  • NATURE INDEX

Google Scholar-based tool gives extra credit to first and last authors

Researchers welcome the initiative, but say it doesn’t go far enough to capture the nuance of researcher productivity and impact.
By
  1. Dalmeet Singh Chawla

    1. Dalmeet Singh Chawla is a freelance science journalist based in London.

The h-index — a widely used measure of impact based on publications and citation count over time — treats all of an author’s papers equally, irrespective of whether they are a first, last or middle author. A browser extension called GScholarLens now aims to change that for Google Scholar users.

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doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-025-03281-4

Nature Index’s news and supplement content is editorially independent of its publisher, Springer Nature. For more information about Nature Index, see the homepage.

References

  1. Karthik, V., Anand, I. S., Mahanta, U. & Sharma, G. Preprint at arXiv https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2509.04124 (2025).

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