Modeling a successful citation trajectory structure for scholar's impact evaluation in Israeli academia

Abstract

One of the main concerns of researchers and institutions is how to assess the future performance of scholars and identify their potential to become successful scientists. In this study, we model scholarly success in terms of the probability of a scholar belonging to a group of highly impactful scholars as determined by their citation trajectory structures. To this end, we developed a new set of impact measures based on a scholar's citation trajectory structure (rather than on absolute citation or h-index rates), that show a stable trend and scale for highly impactful scholars, independent of their field of study, seniority and citation index. These measures were then incorporated as influence factors into the logistic regression models and used as features for probabilistic classifiers based on these models to identify the successful scholars in the heterogeneous corpus of 400 of most and least cited professors from two Israeli universities. From the practical point of view, the study may yield useful insights and serve as an aid in making promotion decisions by institutions, as well as a self-assessment tool for researchers who strive to increase their academic influence and become leaders in their field.