  Author performance indices (such as h-index and its variants) fail to resolve
ties while ranking authors with low index values (majority in number) which
includes the young researchers. In this work we leverage the citations as well
as collaboration profile of an author in a novel way using a weighted
multi-layered network and propose a variant of page-rank algorithm to obtain a
new author performance measure, $C^3$-index. Experiments on a massive
publication dataset reveal several interesting characteristics of our metric:
(i) we observe that $C^3$-index is consistent over time, (ii) $C^3$-index has
high potential to break ties among low rank authors, (iii) $C^3$-index can
effectively be used to predict future achievers at the early stage of their
career.
