Indexes that account for good representations of an individual's productivity are theme of major importance for the evaluation and comparison among researchers. Recently, a new index was proposed combining productivity with impact such that a researcher with index h has h papers with at least h citations. A drawback of this is the sensitivity to the research field. Here we propose a new index (hI) that accounts for the coauthorship effect. The statistics of h and hI are presented for Brazilian research. We have found a universal curve for different disciplines, allowing a comparison among scientists of different research areas.

Publishing in high-quality international journals is part of today’s scientific zeitgeist and a challenge for researchers from developed and developing countries alike. However, competition to attract an editor’s attention and to convince reviewers
might be tougher for scientists from non- English speaking (NES) countries. As various authors have pointed out, the proficiency of the English language among a country’s scientists could influence its scientific output (Man et al, 2004; Victora & Moreira, 2006; Meneghini & Packer, 2007; Vasconcelos et al, 2007). A recent econometric study, for example, stated that English proficiency is a significant factor for the performance of European science (Bauwens et al, 2007).

The number h of papers with at least h citations has been proposed to evaluate individuals scientific research production. This index is robust in several ways but yet strongly dependent on the research field. We propose a complementary index 2 (T )
hI = h Na , with (T ) Na being the total number of authors in the considered h papers. A researcher with index hI has hI papers with at least hI citation if he/she had published alone. We have obtained the rank plots of h and hI for four Brazilian scientific communities. In contrast with the h-index, the hI index rank plots collapse into a single curve allowing comparison among different research areas.