Predicting Scholars' Scientific Impact

Abstract

We tested the underlying assumption that citation counts are reliable predictors of future success, analyzing complete citation data on the careers of ~150,000 scientists. Our results show that i) among all citation indicators, the annual citations at the time of prediction is the best predictor of future citations, ii) future citations of a scientist's published papers can be predicted accurately (r(2) = 0.80 for a 1-year prediction, P<0.001) but iii) future citations of future work are hardly predictable.