  What is the value of a scientist and its impact upon the scientific thinking?
How can we measure the prestige of a journal or of a conference? The evaluation
of the scientific work of a scientist and the estimation of the quality of a
journal or conference has long attracted significant interest, due to the
benefits from obtaining an unbiased and fair criterion. Although it appears to
be simple, defining a quality metric is not an easy task. To overcome the
disadvantages of the present metrics used for ranking scientists and journals,
J.E. Hirsch proposed a pioneering metric, the now famous h-index. In this
article, we demonstrate several inefficiencies of this index and develop a pair
of generalizations and effective variants of it to deal with scientist ranking
and with publication forum ranking. The new citation indices are able to
disclose trendsetters in scientific research, as well as researchers that
constantly shape their field with their influential work, no matter how old
they are. We exhibit the effectiveness and the benefits of the new indices to
unfold the full potential of the h-index, with extensive experimental results
obtained from DBLP, a widely known on-line digital library.
