As difficult as it is to forecast a researcher’s success, the field of metascience—the study of scientists—is giving it a go. In research published today (September 12) in Nature, scientists at Northwestern University and the University of Chicago used past performance to predict a researcher’s future h index, a measure of scientific output that takes into account numbers of publications and citations.
“This is the first study I’ve seen to try to predict the h index prospectively,” said Peter Higgins, a professor of gastroenterology at the University of Michigan, who was not involved in the study. Predicting future output is exactly what department committees are trying to do when they evaluate a faculty member for promotion or tenure, Higgins noted: “Do we invest in this particular faculty member? Are they on the right track?”
The h index was developed in 2005 by Jorge Hirsch, a physicist at the University of ...
