Posted by Metrics of publication success are now a common feature of academic life. We are all familiar with concepts such as the number of publications per year, the level of citation (peer referencing) of published works, and the impact factor of journals. The first two metrics are neatly captured within a single metric, the h index. Under the metric originally developed by Jorge Hirsch, a scientist has an h-index of n if he or she has published n articles receiving at least n citations each. Einstein and Darwin have impressive h-indices of 96 and 63, respectively.
A recent study by Daniel Acuna and colleagues has developed a model predicting future h-index success (5 – 10 years into the future) based on a combination of current factors: number of articles published to date, career length, number of distinct journals published in, and the proportion of publications in top journals (impact factor >10).
You can have a go a predicting your future h-index here.
Article: Acuna DE, Allesina S, Kording KP (2012) Nature 489, 201–202. doi:10.1038/489201a
[Featured image: Photo by Valerie Everett, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-SA 2.0)]
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