Predicting the research performance of early career scientists

Abstract

This paper examines how early career-related factors can predict the future research performance of computer and information scientists. Although a few bibliometric studies have previously investigated multiple factors relating to early career scientists that significantly predict their future research performance, there have been limited studies on early career-related factors affecting scientists in the fields of information science and computer science. This study analyzes 4102 scientists whose publishing careers started in the same year. The criteria used to quantify future research performance of the target scientists included the number of publications and citation counts of publications in a 4-year citation window to indicate future research productivity and research impact, respectively. These criteria were regressed on 13 early career-related factors. The results showed that these factors accounted for about 27% and 23% of the future productivity of the target scientists in terms of journal articles and conference papers, respectively; these 13 factors were also responsible for 19% of the future impact of target scientists’ journal articles and 19% of the future impact of their conference papers. The factor that most contributed to explaining the future research performance (i.e. publication numbers) and future research impact (i.e. citation counts of publications) was the number of publications (both journal articles and conference papers) produced by the target scientists in their early career years.