In Brazil, conferences are evaluated according to a few criteria, the main one being Google’s H5 (h-index in the last 5 years). I wonder if this is unfair to conferences that do not take place every year.

For instance, take FOIS – Formal Ontology in Information Systems Conference, which takes place every two years. If you calculate its H5 considering the past 5 years (2012-2016), you will only include the past 3 conferences. I think H5 should, instead, consider the past 5 instances of the event, in the case of FOIS: 2008-2016.

If you do that, you jump from an H5 of 4 to an H5 of 11, as shown below (links take you to Google Scholar, where you can verify the number of citations):

1. Virtual factory data model to support performance evaluation of production systems, 2012. Citations: 64;
2. Ontology-driven information systems: Past, present and future, 2008. Citations: 27;
3. Counterparts in language and space, 2008. Citations: 26;
4. Characterizing Functions based on Ontological Models from an Engineering, 2010. Citations: 21;
5. Dispositions and the infectious disease ontology, 2010. Citations: 20;
6. Similarity as a quality indicator in ontology engineering, 2008. Citations: 17;
7. Smart product description object (spdo), 2008. Citations: 16;
8. A systematic approach to developing ontologies for manufacturing service modeling, 2012. Citations: 15;
9. Towards the nature of citations, 2008. Citations: 13;
10. Introducing realist ontology for the representation of adverse events, 2008. Citations: 12;
11. Island reasoning for ALCHI ontologies, 2008. Citations: 11;

What do you think?