Career-long data outperforms recent data in predicting the publication success of physicists

Abstract Predicting the future success of researchers is an important topic that is attracting increasing attention in the research community. However, there are no comprehensive studies that show which predictive bibliometric indices best predict the short-term success of researchers. It does not matter whether these are metrics based on the researcher’s most recent publications or metrics calculated based on all publications throughout the researcher’s career. In this study, we are interested in how the two time windows used as the basis for calculating predictive bibliometric indices affect the empirical results of a classifier in predicting the success of researchers. Using the American Physical Society dataset, we compare the performance of the classifiers using 10-fold cross-validation to determine the most accurate classifier in both scenarios described above. The results of this study disprove our initial hypothesis that it is better to train with bibliometric indices computed from recent publications. This result suggests that there is a need to assess scientists more comprehensively, as focusing on recent publications and not taking into account results from earlier stages of their career may lead to poorer results in predicting scientists’ publication success.