Science deserves better tools. We're building them.
The way we search the literature, the way we buy reagents, and the way we measure a researcher's impact were all designed decades ago. They haven't kept up. A first-year grad student who publishes a paradigm-shifting paper in Cellstill ranks below a retired PI who hasn't been near a lab in fifteen years — because the h-index rewards time served, not impact. That's a measurement problem, and it has real consequences for the people doing the most exciting work in science right now.
So we're building the alternative. A grad student and a 30-year PI should be measured by the same standard — impact relative to their peers, right now, in their field, not lifetime accumulation. Searching the literature should take seconds and understand biology — not the Boolean syntax PubMed has barely changed in twenty years. And a scientist should see instantly that the $500 antibody in their cart is the same clone as one selling for $150 — so a handful of suppliers can't quietly charge a premium on switching risk.
PubIndex is built on these ideas. The PubIndex Score is a 1–99 metric that measures impact across your full body of work, normalized for career stage. Emerging researchers compete against emerging researchers. Senior leaders compete against senior leaders. We normalize for author position, citation velocity, field size, and journal quality. We built search that understands biology, not just keywords. We surface the reagents actually used in the papers you're reading, with transparent alternatives side by side. The full scoring methodology — including the exact equations — is laid out below.
PubIndex is free. No account required. No subscription. No paywall. The tools of scientific discovery should be accessible to everyone. We sustain ourselves by helping labs find better, more affordable reagents — when your budget stretches further, so does ours.
PubIndex Score Methodology
Fully transparent. Fully reproducible. Built on open data.
What the PubIndex Score Measures
The PubIndex Score is a 1–99 percentile score that measures a researcher's publication impact across their full body of work, normalized for career stage. Unlike the h-index, which rewards cumulative lifetime output regardless of seniority, the PubIndex Score normalizes for career stage — so a first-year grad student can score 99, and a 30-year PI can also score 99. They're measured against their actual peers.
How Papers Are Weighted
Each paper is weighted by citations, topic relevance, recency, and journal quality — work in flagship journals counts for more, predatory and mega-journals for less. We prioritize first and last authors, which limits the incentive for gift authorship. A researcher's total is then converted to a 1–99 percentile within their topic and career zone.
The Exact Math
We don't hide the formula. Each paper earns an impact score:
impact = ( C + IF · e−C / IF ) · relevance
- C — how many times the paper has been cited.
- IF — the journal's impact factor, used as a Bayesian prior.
- relevance — how central the paper is to the topic being ranked.
The IF · e−C/IF term is what we call phantom citations. A brand-new paper in a strong journal is credited up front with roughly the citations its journal would predict — and that credit decaystoward the paper's real citation count as the citations actually arrive. This fixes the perverse case where a landmark paper from last year loses to a forgettable one that has simply had more time to accumulate citations. Journal prestige stops mattering once a paper has earned its own citations.
A researcher's score on a topic is the sum of their three highest-impact papers — one landmark result outweighs ten forgettable ones, and a single major paper is enough to rank (there is no minimum paper count). That total becomes a 1–99 percentile against peers in the same topic and career zone — and the same total ranks the leaderboards: within each zone, researchers are ordered by it.
Career Zones
Researchers are scored within their career zone — not against the entire field. The zones are mutually exclusive: anyone with a senior-author (last or corresponding) paper on a topic is placed in a senior zone, never in Rising Stars. Seniority onset is measured across a researcher's whole career, not just within the topic.
| Zone | Who | Scoring Window |
|---|---|---|
| Rising Stars | First authors | A first-author paper in the last 5 years |
| Emerging Leaders | New senior authors (last or corresponding) | First senior-author paper within the last 10 years |
| Current Senior Leaders | Active senior authors (last or corresponding) | A recent senior-author paper |
Anti-Gaming Measures
- Journal quality: Publishing in predatory or mega-journals provides minimal score boost regardless of citation count.
- Author position: We prioritize first and last authors, reducing the incentive for gift authorship.
- Topic relevance: Papers must mention the topic in their title or abstract to count.
- Consortium filtering: Organizations and consortiums are excluded from researcher rankings.
Limitations
The PubIndex Score does not measure teaching quality, mentorship, grant funding, clinical impact, patent activity, or any metric outside of publication-based citation impact. It is designed to supplement — not replace — qualitative peer review.
Responsible Metrics
PubIndex endorses the principles of the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) and the Leiden Manifesto. We encourage evaluators to use the PubIndex Score as one data point among many.
Data & Privacy
All publication data comes from open, publicly available scholarly datasets covering 250M+ works. Every score is built from that open data and recomputed weekly.
PubIndex does not require an account and does not track individual users. Search queries are processed to return results and are not stored or sold. We use no third-party analytics or advertising trackers.