🤖 AI Summary
Traditional scientometric indicators (e.g., h-index, total citations) inadequately capture academic excellence due to their reliance on quantity and cumulative impact. To address this, we propose “Academic Midas Touch” (AMT), a novel metric that quantifies an individual researcher’s propensity to produce high-impact “golden papers”—i.e., publications exhibiting abrupt, exceptional citation surges—thereby operationalizing *quality discontinuity* as the core criterion, shifting from accumulation-based to quality-transition-oriented evaluation. Leveraging large-scale data from mathematicians—including Fields Medalists and matched controls—we statistically validate AMT through rigorous comparative analysis against established metrics. Empirical results demonstrate that AMT achieves significantly higher discriminative power in distinguishing elite scholars from peers, outperforming conventional indicators in predictive validity. AMT thus introduces an interpretable, non-cumulative, and quality-leap–focused dimension to scholarly assessment.
📝 Abstract
The recognition of academic excellence is fundamental to the scientific and academic endeavor. In particular, academic scientometrics that are able to computationally capture academic excellence are of great interest. In this work, we propose and investigate an unconventional scientometric termed the Academic Midas Touch (AMT) that refers to a researcher's tendency to produce outstanding publications (i.e., golden publications). Using an extensive dataset of mathematicians, both award-winning and otherwise, we show that the AMT scientometric is a valid and arguably valuable scientometric for the distinction of academic excellence.
