Abstract: As a key problem of the vibration-based damage detection, many damage indexes was developed in recent years, but a systematic and effective method to evaluate those damage indexes is not available till now. Therefore, a new assessment method including sensitivity analysis of damage indexes to stiffness, robustness to noise, ability of correct identification based on incomplete information and capacity of indicating locations of damage precisely is proposed in this paper to reflect various main problems in the damage detection for guiding choice of the proper damage index. The numerical example results show that conclusions drawn from proposed method as a foreordain way are consistent with common conclusions of previous study, which means it has strong reliability. The assessment method containing four indexes to quantify characteristic of indicators has bright prosperity in large scale structures for all the pacing factors in practice are considered.