Predicting publication productivity for authors: Shallow or deep architecture?

Academic administrators and funding agencies must predict the publication productivity of research groups and individuals to assess authors’ abilities. However, such prediction remains an elusive task due to the randomness of individual research and the diversity of authors’ productivity patterns. We applied two kinds of approaches to this prediction task: deep neural network learning and model-based approaches. We found that a neural network cannot give a good long-term prediction for groups, while the model-based approaches cannot provide short-term predictions for individuals. We proposed a model that integrates the advantages of both data-driven and model-based approaches, and the effectiveness of this method was validated by applying it to a high-quality dblp dataset, demonstrating that the proposed model outperforms the tested data-driven and model-based approaches.