Abstract: Research hotspot is an important embodiment of the frontier and key issues in academic
research. It is of great significance to evaluate the research hotspot of academic journals. This paper proposes
a new bibliometric index, the “hot index”, which is calculated by dividing the sum of the total citation
number of the five most cited papers in the past two years by the natural logarithm of the article quantity
of the journals in the past two years. The paper takes the library information science journals of Chinese
Social Sciences Citation Index (CSSCI) as an example and conducts an empirical study based on the CNKI
citation data. The study found that the hot index can be an important journal source index, featuring a high
correlation with influence factor and h index. For the smaller research areas, it is recommended to use three
highly cited paper to calculate the hot index, and for the large research areas, it can increase the number
of highly cited paper to calculate the hot index. The hot index can be promoted on the basis of further
research.

Key words: Hot index, Academic journal, Impact factor, Article quantity