  Researchers are often evaluated by citation-based metrics. Such metrics can
inform hiring, promotion, and funding decisions. Concerns have been expressed
that popular citation-based metrics incentivize researchers to maximize the
production of publications. Such incentives may not be optimal for scientific
progress. Here we present a citation-based measure that rewards both
productivity and taste: the researcher's ability to focus on impactful
contributions. The presented measure, CAP, balances the impact of publications
and their quantity, thus incentivizing researchers to consider whether a
publication is a useful addition to the literature. CAP is simple,
interpretable, and parameter-free. We analyze the characteristics of CAP for
highly-cited researchers in biology, computer science, economics, and physics,
using a corpus of millions of publications and hundreds of millions of
citations with yearly temporal granularity. CAP produces qualitatively
plausible outcomes and has a number of advantages over prior metrics. Results
can be explored at https://cap-measure.org/
