Bibliometric Indicators of Young Authors in Astrophysics: Can Later Stars be Predicted?

We test 16 bibliometric indicators with respect to their validity at the level of the individual researcher by estimating their power to predict later success-ful researchers. We compare the indicators of a sample of astrophysics researchers who later co-authored highly cited papers before their first land-mark paper with the distributions of these indi-cators over a random control group of young au-thors in astronomy and astrophysics. We find that field and citation-window normalisation substan-tially improves the predicting power of citation indi-cators. The two indicators of total influence based on citation numbers normalised with expected ci-tation numbers are the only indicators which show differences between later stars and random authors significant on a 1 % level. Indicators of paper out-put are not very useful to predict later stars. The famous h-index makes no difference at all between later stars and the random control group.