title: Predicting scholars' scientific impact.
abstract: We tested the underlying assumption that citation counts are reliable predictors of future success, analyzing complete citation data on the careers of ~150,000 scientists. Our results show that i) among all citation indicators, the annual citations at the time of prediction is the best predictor of future citations, ii) future citations of a scientist's published papers can be predicted accurately (r(2) = 0.80 for a 1-year prediction, P<0.001) but iii) future citations of future work are hardly predictable.
authors.affiliation: ETH Zürich, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Chair of Sociology, in particular of Modeling and Simulation, Zürich, Switzerland. amin@gess.ethz.ch
authors.forename: Amin
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Mazloumian
mesh_terms: D001319:Authorship; D002322:Career Mobility; D006801:Humans; D017712:Peer Review, Research; D011642:Publications; D012108:Research Personnel; D012586:Science