Evaluating scholars’ achievements is an important problem in the science of science with applications in the evaluation of grant proposals and promotion applications. Since the number of scholars and the number of scholarly outputs grow exponentially with time, well-designed ranking metrics that have the potential to assist in these tasks are of prime importance. To rank scholars, it is important to put their achievements in perspective by comparing them with the achievements of other scholars active in the same period. We propose here a particular way of doing so: by computing the evaluated scholar's share on each year's citations which quantifies how the scholar fares in competition with the others. We assess the resulting ranking method using the American Physical Society citation data and four prestigious physics awards. Our results show that the new method significantly outperforms other ranking methods in identifying the prize laureates.

评估学者的成就是科学科学中的一个重要问题，其在赠款申请和促销申请评估中的应用。由于学者的数量和学术产出的数量都随着时间呈指数增长，因此精心设计的排名指标具有帮助完成这些任务的潜力至关重要。要对学者进行排名，重要的是，将他们的成就与同期活跃的其他学者的成就进行比较，以透视他们的成就。我们在这里提出一种特殊的做法：通过计算被评估学者在每年被引用文献中所占的份额，从而量化该学者如何与其他学者竞争。我们使用美国物理学会的引文数据和四个著名的物理学奖评估所得的排名方法。