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)."

Comments

Re:Teaching?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.