"It sounds like a science administrator’s dream — or a scientist's worst nightmare: a formula that predicts how often research papers will be cited. But a team of data scientists now says it could be possible. They report1 today that a simple model allows reasonably accurate predictions of a paper’s future performance on the basis of about five years of its citation history.

"We would like to be able to predict as early as possible, and with relatively stable accuracy, how impactful a particular paper will be in the future," says study co-author Dashun Wang at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center in New York. Others say that the work, published today in Science."