  Understanding determinants of success in academic careers is critically
important to both scholars and their employing organizations. While
considerable research efforts have been made in this direction, there is still
a lack of a quantitative approach to modeling the academic careers of scholars
due to the massive confounding factors. To this end, in this paper, we propose
to explore the determinants of academic career success through an empirical and
predictive modeling perspective, with a focus on two typical academic honors,
i.e., IEEE Fellow and ACM Fellow. We analyze the importance of different
factors quantitatively, and obtain some insightful findings. Specifically, we
analyze the co-author network and find that potential scholars work closely
with influential scholars early on and more closely as they grow. Then we
compare the academic performance of male and female Fellows. After comparison,
we find that to be elected, females need to put in more effort than males. In
addition, we also find that being a Fellow could not bring the improvements of
citations and productivity growth. We hope these derived factors and findings
can help scholars to improve their competitiveness and develop well in their
academic careers.
