The Academic Midas Touch: An Indicator of Academic Excellence

TL;DR

This work introduces the Academic Midas Touch (AMT), a metric that quantifies a researcher's propensity to produce highly cited publications within a short window by computing AMT(s) = (1/|P|) sum_{p in P} G(p) with G(p) = 1 if a publication reaches at least $y$ citations within $x$ years. Using a dataset of 8,468 mathematicians and 486,622 publications, the authors perform data curation, parameter tuning, and statistical analyses to compare AMT against standard metrics like the H-index, i10-index, and total citations. They find that AMT correlates moderately with those metrics but captures a distinct aspect of performance, and it better distinguishes award-winning mathematicians from matched non-award peers, albeit with limitations in generalizability across fields. The work suggests AMT as a complementary tool for evaluating academic excellence, highlighting the need for field-specific validation and exploration of alternative AMT formulations.

Abstract

The recognition of academic excellence is fundamental to the scientific and academic endeavor. However, the term "academic excellence" is often interpreted in different ways, typically, using popular scientometrics such as the H-index, i10-index, and citation counts. In this work, we study an under-explored aspect of academic excellence -- researchers' propensity to produce highly cited publications. We formulate this novel perspective using a simple yet effective indicator termed the "Academic Midas Touch" (AMT). We empirically show that this perspective does not fully align with popular scientometrics and favorably compares to them in distinguishing award-winning scientists.

Figures (3)

• Figure 1: A schematic view of the empirical evaluation process.
• Figure 2: The average AMT score in our sample as a function of $x$ (time threshold) and $y$ (citations threshold).
• Figure 3: The AMT score distributions of the award-winning sample (in green) and the control group (in blue).