  Scientometric predictors of research performance need to be validated by
showing that they have a high correlation with the external criterion they are
trying to predict. The UK Research Assessment Exercise (RAE), together with the
growing movement toward making the full-texts of research articles freely
available on the web -- offer a unique opportunity to test and validate a
wealth of old and new scientometric predictors, through multiple regression
analysis: Publications, journal impact factors, citations, co-citations,
citation chronometrics (age, growth, latency to peak, decay rate),
hub/authority scores, h-index, prior funding, student counts, co-authorship
scores, endogamy/exogamy, textual proximity, download/co-downloads and their
chronometrics, etc. can all be tested and validated jointly, discipline by
discipline, against their RAE panel rankings in the forthcoming parallel
panel-based and metric RAE in 2008. The weights of each predictor can be
calibrated to maximize the joint correlation with the rankings. Open Access
Scientometrics will provide powerful new means of navigating, evaluating,
predicting and analyzing the growing Open Access database, as well as powerful
incentives for making it grow faster. ~
