Carnot Efficiency of Publication

Publications are increasingly (often wrongly) being used as research outputs. Furthermore, ‘impacts’ of such publications are often (wrongly as well) measured using ‘citations’. Popular metric, like the ‘Hirsch index’, or ‘h-index’ is used as yardstick for judging the quality of individual researchers. However, there are many controversies around it, whether it is a good yardstick, which could be optimized, adultered, etc. ‘h-index’ is also highly dependent on particular fields, which was pointed out by J. E. Hirsch himself in the second last paragraph in his paper [1]. Nevertheless, if we consider citations as the output parameter, and papers as the input parameter for the publication system, it is worthwhile to estimate the efficiency of such process. The publication efficiency can be simply measured as