The Academic Midas Touch: An Indicator of Academic Excellence

TL;DR

This paper introduces the Academic Midas Touch (AMT), a new indicator measuring researchers' tendency to produce highly cited work, which better distinguishes award-winning scientists than traditional scientometric metrics.

Contribution

The paper proposes the AMT as a novel indicator of academic excellence focusing on highly cited publications, offering a new perspective beyond existing metrics.

Findings

AMT correlates better with scientific awards than traditional metrics

AMT provides a distinct measure of academic excellence

The approach offers a new way to evaluate researcher impact

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.