Redefining Academic Performance: The Development of the NK Composite Scholarly Performance Index

The evaluation of academic performance using bibliometric indicators is central to quality assurance, promotion, and reward systems in higher education. However, widely used metrics, such as publication counts, total citations, and the h-index, face persistent limitations, including selective coverage of scholarly outputs, susceptibility to citation manipulation, insufficient adjustment for career length and publication continuity, and the uniform treatment of heterogeneous publication types and co-author contributions. To address these issues, this study proposes the NK index as a time- and contribution-adjusted composite scholarly performance measure that integrates (i) a broader set of citable scholarly outputs, (ii) publication- and citation-type scores, (iii) author contribution coefficients, and (iv) academic age and productive duration parameters. By combining output volume and citation impact within a single normalised score, the NK index aims to enable fairer comparisons across academics with different career trajectories when only bibliometric data are available.