Abstract

I review my book “Metrics of Research Impact in Astronomy” (PASP) and my Proc Nat Acad Sci paper on using metrics measured 10-15 years after the PhD to predict later impact.  The book calibrates how metrics from the SAO/NASA Astrophysics Data System can be used to estimate the impact of astronomy research careers.  Calibration is based on perceived impact as voted by 22 experienced astronomers for 510 faculty members at 17 highly-ranked university astronomy departments world-wide.  Three voters are members of our UT Astronomy Department.  I calibrate 10 metrics and show that they individually reproduce mean voted impact with an RMS of ~ 1/8 of the dynamic range.  The  average of all 10 metrics has RMS ~ 1/12 of the dynamic range.  The PNAS paper calibrates how 3 metrics -- citations of refereed papers, citations normalized by numbers of co-authors, and citations of first-author papers -- can be used to predict future impact.  Average prediction machines are constructed for different cohorts of 1990-2007 PhDs and used to postdict 2017 impact from metrics measured soon after post-PhD rampup.  The aim of this work is to inform decisions on resource allocation such as job hires and tenure decisions.  That is, the aim is to lend some of the rigor that we use when we do scientific research to the difficult and subjective job of judging research careers.