A look back at the crystal ball

I wrote the bulk of this post this post five years ago, back in 2012. That week, a paper came out in Nature that claimed to predict... the future! At least, it claimed to predict one part of my academic future, namely, my h-index:

At the time the paper came out, there was an online calculator. It hasn’t succumbed to link rot: it’s still there! I entered in the following values then:

• Current h-index: It was 8 in 2012 (according to Google Scholar).
• Number of articles: 24 (I only counted my original technical articles).
• Years since first article: 20 (then; my first paper was in 1992).
• Number of distinct journals: 20.
• Number in “top” journals (a.k.a. the glamour mags): 0.

The program predicted my h-index now, five years later, would be 13. Since I used my Google Scholar data, I went back and checked my Google Scholar profile.

How did the prediction fare? Zooming in...

Holy cow!

Perfect. The prediction was perfect.

It’s a bit spooky.

Now I’m having one of those existential crises of whether my fate is set and whether there is anything I can do about it. As Ahab said in Moby Dick:

Is it I, God, or who, that lifts this arm? But if the great sun move not of himself; but is as an errand-boy in heaven; nor one single star can revolve, but by some invisible power; how then can this one small heart beat; this one small brain think thoughts; unless God does that beating, does that thinking, does that living, and not I.

The 2012 prediction reaches ten years forward, predicting an h-index of 21 in 2022. Of course, my publishing profile has changed in five years. I entered my updated data, and experienced my second existential crisis of the day:

My predicted h-index for 2022 has gone down from five years ago! The new prediction drops my 2022 h-index by 3 points! Argh! It does kind of make you feel like you’re failing at science.

Next, to schedule a post with this graph for 2022. We’ll see how close it is.

Related posts

Gazing into the crystal ball of h-index
Academic astrology