Analysis the exploratory factor of evaluating indicators for the researchers\' scientific outputs

Background and aim: there are different indexes for evaluation of scientific outputs of scholars. This study aimed at evaluating and analyzing 9 cases of these indexes by using actual data and exploratory factor analysis. Material and methods: 40 citation reports of researchers was extracted from Web of Science (WoS) and entered into the checklist with the scientific age of researchers and the age of cited papers. Some descriptive and analytic statistics especially exploratory factor analysis were used by SPSS version 19. Findings: Exploratory factor analysis showed 3 factors with especial values and greater than 1 and with explained variance over 96% in 9 indexes. Factors 1, 2 and 3 explained 44.38%, 28.19%, and 23.48% of variance in correlation coefficient matrix, respectively. M index (with coefficient of 90%) in factor 1, a index (with coefficient of 91%) in factor 2, and h and h2 indexes (with coefficients of 93%) in factor 3 had the highest factor loadings. Correlation coefficients and related comparative diagrams indicated that the same h index among 9 indexes has been more accurate and different in recent years. Conclusions: As the studied supplemental indexes could not satisfied all limits of h index, scientific society needs a new index which accurately evaluates the quality besides the quantity of individual researchers' scientific outputs