The present study investigated the correlation between classical h-index (h) and Altmetric h-index (halt), classical g-index (g) and Altmetric g-index (galt) values of top ten highly cited authors in the field of artificial intelligence. Altmetric counterparts of h-index and g-index were calculated by using the same method as proposed for the original indices, but based on altmetric attention scores (AAS) in place of citation counts. While publication data and citation counts were collected from Web of Science database, altmetric attention scores were collected by using Webometric Analyst software. The indices were manually computed. Kendall’s tau correlation test was conducted on h and halt, and on g and galt values. Statistically significant very high degree of positive correlation was found between h and halt (tau = 0.9189, p = 0.0004). Correlation between g and galt showed even higher degree of positivity with statistical significance (tau = 0.9775, p = 0.0001). The current literature on metric studies primarily focuses on analysing the correlation between citation counts and altmetric attention scores, confining to article-level metrics. This study attempted to measure the correlation between two well-known author-level metrics: h-index, g-index and their altmetric counterparts. It can be expanded by modelling the relationship between classical indices and their altmetric indices to understand the influence of Altmetrics on classical metrics.

Artificial intelligence, Citation metrics, H-index, Altmetric h-index, G-index, Altmetric g-index, Kendall’s Correlation