Moneyball for Academics: Network Analysis for Predicting Research Impact
Bertsimas, D., Brynjolfsson, E., Reichman, S. and Silberholz, J., 2015. OR Forum—Tenure analytics: Models for predicting research impact. Operations Research, 63(6), pp.1246-1261.
17 Pages Posted: 5 Jan 2014 Last revised: 21 Nov 2018
Date Written: January 4, 2014
Abstract
How are scholars ranked for promotion, tenure and honors? How can we improve the quantitative tools available for decision makers when making such decisions? Can we predict the academic impact of scholars and papers at early stages using quantitative tools?
Current academic decisions (hiring, tenure, prizes) are mostly very subjective. In the era of “Big Data,” a solid quantitative set of measurements should be used to support this decision process.
This paper presents a method for predicting the probability of a paper being in the most cited papers using only data available at the time of publication. We find that highly cited papers have different structural properties and that these centrality measures are associated with increased odds of being in the top percentile of citation count.
The paper also presents a method for predicting the future impact of researchers, using information available early in their careers. This model integrates information about changes in a young researcher’s role in the citation network and co-authorship network and demonstrates how this improves predictions of their future impact.
These results show that the use of quantitative methods can complement the qualitative decision-making process in academia and improve the prediction of academic impact.
Keywords: Citation analysis, Academic impact, Analytics, Networks
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