{"id":2926,"date":"2012-09-22T21:00:41","date_gmt":"2012-09-23T04:00:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/?p=2926"},"modified":"2012-09-22T21:04:18","modified_gmt":"2012-09-23T04:04:18","slug":"predicting-h-index","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/?p=2926","title":{"rendered":"Predicting h-index"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>What is your future impact?<\/p>\n<p>Researchers Acuna, Allesina, and Kording decided to use machine learning to find out.  They recently published a <i>Nature<\/i> article, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nature.com\/nature\/journal\/v489\/n7415\/full\/489201a.html\">&#8220;Future impact: Predicting scientific success,&#8221;<\/a> that describes their method and findings.<\/p>\n<p>Their goal was to predict a scientist&#8217;s future h-index given his or her current bibliographic data.  <a href=\"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/?p=1371\">I wrote about discovering the h-index<\/a> two years ago.  Nowadays, Google scholar will calculate this value for you.  It&#8217;s a measure of research impact, characterized as the number <i>h<\/i> of your papers that have at least <i>h<\/i> citations. <\/p>\n<p>Acuna et al. collected data on 3,085 neuroscientists and performed a linear regression on these features:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>n: number of papers written\n<li>h: current h-index\n<li>y: years since publishing first article\n<li>j:\u00c2\u00a0number of distinct journals published in\n<li>q: number of articles in <em>Nature<\/em>, <em>Science<\/em>, <em>Nature Neuroscience<\/em>,<em> Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences<\/em>, and <em>Neuron<\/em>\n<\/ul>\n<p>They found that this five-factor prediction did better at predicting the future h-index than just using the current h-index itself.  Their R<sup>2<\/sup> value for predicting h-index one year into the future was 0.92; five years out, 0.67; and ten years out, 0.48.  Their conclusion was that raw h-index numbers were not as predictive as also capturing the scientist&#8217;s &#8220;breadth&#8221; (in <i>j<\/i>) and the quality of the publication venues (in <i>q<\/i>).<\/p>\n<p>You can <a href=\"http:\/\/klab.smpp.northwestern.edu\/h-index.html\">try out their model on your own data<\/a>, although they note that it is &#8220;probably reasonably precise for life scientists, but likely to be less meaningful for the other sciences.&#8221;  Also, you&#8217;ll have to wait the specific number of years to see if it comes true.  Or you can plug in your data from a few years ago and see how the predictions match the present.  Using my data from two years ago (h-index 12), their system predicts that my h-index this year should reach 19.  Google scholar pegs it at 17 right now, so either I am not reaching my proper potential, or their model is wrong. ;)<\/p>\n<p>There&#8217;s more than recreational fun going on here.  The authors note that h-index values may be used in tenure decisions.  In that context, the ability to predict a candidate&#8217;s h-index five years into the future could have even more impact&#8212;if it were sufficiently reliable.  As usual, we can hope that such decisions are made with more than just these impoverished metrics in mind!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>What is your future impact? Researchers Acuna, Allesina, and Kording decided to use machine learning to find out. They recently published a Nature article, &#8220;Future impact: Predicting scientific success,&#8221; that describes their method and findings. Their goal was to predict a scientist&#8217;s future h-index given his or her current bibliographic data. I wrote about discovering [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[13,55],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2926"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2926"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2926\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2933,"href":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2926\/revisions\/2933"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2926"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2926"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2926"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}