Current Science

Bingjia Shao ¹, Feng Xiao ¹, Star X. Zhao ²

Affiliations
1 School of Economics and Business Administration, Chongqing University, Chongqing 400030, CN
2 Department of Information Management, East China Normal University, Shanghai 200241, CN

Abstract

The aim of this study is to find whether the h-index and Schubert-Glänzel model which was originally used in bibliometrics can work in the broader social and information systems, such as e-commerce. This study introduces the popularity index (h_P) to profile on-line sellers and products and tests the accuracy of the Schubert-Glänzel model of the h_P index using the Levenberg-Marquardt algorithm. The h_P index was tested on Taobao, a leading Chinese e-commerce marketplace. About 300 products on Taobao were randomly selected from 10 categories of the most popular on-line products as samples for this study. It was found that h_P is consistent with the Schubert-Glänzel model the h-index. This shows that the existing theoretical bibliometric model which was originally used in the scientific literature, could be helpful in the broader social or information systems.

Keywords

Bibliometric Measures, E-Commerce, h-Index, Popularity Index.

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