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Study Attempts To Predict Scientists' Career Success
First time accepted submitter nerdyalien writes "In the academic world, it's publish or perish; getting papers accepted by the right journals can make or break a researcher's career. But beyond a cushy tenured position, it's difficult to measure success. In 2005, physicist Jorge Hurst suggested the h-index, a quantitative way to measure the success of scientists via their publication record. This score takes into account both the number and the quality of papers a researcher has published, with quality measured as the number of times each paper has been cited in peer-reviewed journals. H-indices are commonly considered in tenure decisions, making this measure an important one, especially for scientists early in their career. However, this index only measures the success a researcher achieved so far; it doesn't predict their future career trajectory. Some scientists stall out after a few big papers; others become breakthrough stars after a slow start. So how we estimate what a scientist's career will look like several years down the road? A recent article in Nature suggests that we can predict scientific success, but that we need to take into account several attributes of the researcher (such as the breadth of their research)."
I am interested in how anyone would predict the successfull contributions of people who have been hiding in the patent office for several years being denied promotions for their lack of credentials.
Exceptions are exceptionally hard to predict.
Even if they start successfully predicting individuals careers, wouldn't the system eventually break down since professors would probably change based on the results of the prediction?
Good lectures make lazy students.
A student must feel truly abandoned, left to his own designs in an unjust game. Only students like that go to libraries, ask around, and make an effort to actually acquire their skills by themselves. Only those students have a long term chance of achieving anything.
The products of "good lectures"? Like fat and complacent castrated cats that never learned to fend for themselves. Useless.
I do teach at a university. I do good lectures, and produce lots of useless, well fed and lazy fat cats. They rate me as a good prof and everybody is happy. I do what I get paid for - but I know better.
This reminds me of some research about artists which found that you could divide the most 'successful' artists into two rough categories: those who made a big splash right away and those whose classic work did not emerge until much later.
http://www.nber.org/papers/w8368
Unless you need publishing cred for your job, I can't see why anyone would bother going that route.
It's only really useful for tenure in a teaching position, and *slightly* useful for other job prospects. If you're not pursuing either of those, why bother?
1) Your information is owned by the publisher, you can't reprint or send copies to friends.
2) You make no money from having done the work.
3) The work gets restricted to a small audience - the ones who can afford the access fees
4) It's rife with politics and petty, spiteful people
5) The standard format is cripplingly small, confining, and constrained.
6) The standard format requires jargonized cant to promote exclusion.
A website or blog serves much better as a means to disseminate the information. It allows the author to bypass all of the disadvantages, and uses the world as a referee.
Alternately, you could write a book (cf: Quantum Electrodynamics by Feynman). There's no better way to tell if your ideas are good than by writing a book and submitting it to the world for review.
Alternately, you could just not bother. For the vast majority of people, even if they discover a new process or idea publishing it makes no sense. There's perhaps some value in patenting, but otherwise there's no real value in making it public.
Today's scientific publishing is just a made-up barrier with made-up benefits. In the modern world it's been supplanted by better technology.