Moneyball for Academia: Toward Measuring and Maximizing Faculty Performance and Impact

As described in Michael Lewis´ Money ball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, a baseball player´s On Base Percentage is a good metric for rating players´ usefulness or productivity. What metrics can be used for gauging a professor´s performance? Is there a correlation between salary and these metrics? Are these metrics more accurate for certain fields of study? Is the currently popular practice of predominantly hiring junior faculty justified? This paper explores citations and number of publications as metrics for performance in terms of research impact. It searches for correlation between professor salary and these metrics across several subsets of professors. While there are certainly other, less concrete metrics that can be used to rate a professor such as teaching ability or regard in the field, this paper aims to look for correlation in the more measurable metrics. Finally, we build classifiers to predict IEEE/ACM Fellowships of CS/EE professors using these metrics.