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

Area of Science:

• Bibliometrics
• Scientometrics
• Scholarly Impact Analysis

Background:

• Assessing future scholarly performance and identifying potential successful scientists is a key institutional concern.
• Traditional metrics like citation counts and h-index have limitations in predicting long-term impact.
• There is a need for robust measures that capture a scholar's influence trajectory.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop and validate new impact measures based on citation trajectory structures.
• To model scholarly success as the probability of belonging to a group of highly impactful scholars.
• To create a tool for identifying potential successful scientists.

Main Methods:

• Developed novel impact measures derived from citation trajectory structures.
• Utilized logistic regression models incorporating these new measures as influence factors.
• Employed probabilistic classifiers to identify successful scholars within a corpus of 400 professors.

Main Results:

• The new impact measures demonstrate stable trends and scale effectively for highly impactful scholars.
• These measures are independent of field, seniority, and absolute citation index.
• The probabilistic classifiers successfully identified successful scholars based on trajectory structures.

Conclusions:

• Citation trajectory structures offer a robust basis for assessing scholarly success.
• The developed measures can aid institutions in promotion decisions and researchers in self-assessment.
• This approach provides a more nuanced understanding of academic influence and potential.