New perspectives in bibliometric indicators: Moving from citations to citing authors

We propose a new bibliometric indicator, called citing authors index, to assess the impact and spread of the individual scientific research. With this new index we change the paradigm by focusing the attention to the number of citing authors instead of the mere number of citations. We test this index in the mathematical community by using the MathSciNet database of the American Mathematical Society. An aggregate version of the index is also proposed for the comparison of the performances of different institutions