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Study Attempts To Predict Scientists' Career Success

Posted by samzenpus on from the what's-in-the-cards dept.

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)."

9 of 64 comments (clear)

  1. Teaching? by theNAM666 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Ah, nah, what was I thinking. Whether someone produces future scientists or students who know science, doesn't matter one bit. Let's continue to fetishize publication, and the system of duchies it rests on!

    1. Re:Teaching? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      There's really little that an academic can add to the excellent textbooks already published...

      You have obviously never:

      a) Had to learn from papers, rather than textbooks
      b) Had a GOOD lecture

      If you need to get an up-to-date view of a field have a "lecture-ised" literature review from someone who knows what they are talking about can save you literal weeks of sifting through papers. All the best lecture courses don't teach textbooks but go through the primary literature and this takes a good academic to do.

    2. Re:Teaching? by rmstar · · Score: 4, Interesting

      b) Had a GOOD lecture

      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.

    3. Re:Teaching? by The+Dancing+Panda · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I'm just going to put this out there: you're wrong. A good lecture should produce students who want to learn more about the subjects on their own. Not because they have to to pass your class, but because they want to because you made the subject interesting. If you're not doing that, but rather just telling the kids all they need to know to pass your test, it's not a good lecture, it's a good study session.

  2. predicting success is hard by RichMan · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  3. Successful Predictions Feedback Loop Overload by Githaron · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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?

    1. Re:Successful Predictions Feedback Loop Overload by drooling-dog · · Score: 4, Interesting

      It's worse than that. If such an index were used widely in hiring decisions, then its success would be a sef-fulfilling prophecy. It would be guaranteed to work amazingly well, because only scientists scoring highly on it would be allowed to succeed. And if you don't secure a high rating for yourself by the age of 28 or so, then you can just forget it and move on to something else.

      Of course, the world pretty much works that way already, without reducing hiring criteria to a single number. The evil is that HR people will use it to minimize risk and simplify decision making, and so every employer will in effect be using the same hiring criteria. There might as well be a hiring monopoly to ensure that no "square pegs" get through all of the identical round holes.

  4. Excluding Patent Clerks by strangeattraction · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Yes if your had the top thesis advisor, went to the best schools and work in a lab with good funding you do well. What a surprise! This would probably ignore patent clerks that discover Relativity however. I recall one paper that claimed to be able to predict your whereabouts by some kind of cell phone info. I can predict it without any data. %90 of the population spends %90 of the of their time within 1/4 mile of their place of residence or employment/school etc. Wow that was hard. Can I get a grant for that?

  5. Why is publishing useful? by Okian+Warrior · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.