How citation boosts promote scientific paradigm shifts and Nobel Prizes

Abstract

Nobel Prizes are commonly seen to be among the most prestigious achievements of our times. Based on mining several million citations, we quantitatively analyze the processes driving paradigm shifts in science. We find that groundbreaking discoveries of Nobel Prize Laureates and other famous scientists are not only acknowledged by many citations of their landmark papers. Surprisingly, they also boost the citation rates of their previous publications. Given that innovations must outcompete the rich-gets-richer effect for scientific citations, it turns out that they can make their way only through citation cascades. A quantitative analysis reveals how and why they happen. Science appears to behave like a self-organized critical system, in which citation cascades of all sizes occur, from continuous scientific progress all the way up to scientific revolutions, which change the way we see our world. Measuring the "boosting effect" of landmark papers, our analysis reveals how new ideas and new players can make their way and finally triumph in a world dominated by established paradigms. The underlying "boost factor" is also useful to discover scientific breakthroughs and talents much earlier than through classical citation analysis, which by now has become a widespread method to measure scientific excellence, influencing scientific careers and the distribution of research funds. Our findings reveal patterns of collective social behavior, which are also interesting from an attention economics perspective. Understanding the origin of scientific authority may therefore ultimately help to explain, how social influence comes about and why the value of goods depends so strongly on the attention they attract.

arXiv comment6 pages, 6 figures

References in corpus (10)

• An index to quantify an individual's scientific research output
• Power-law distributions in empirical data
• The origin of bursts and heavy tails in human dynamics
• Novelty and Collective Attention
• The power of a good idea: quantitative modeling of the spread of ideas from epidemiological models
• Human Dynamics: The Correspondence Patterns of Darwin and Einstein
• Quantitative and empirical demonstration of the Matthew effect in a study of career longevity
• On Universality in Human Correspondence Activity
• The role of mentorship in protege performance
• Methods for measuring the citations and productivity of scientists across time and discipline

Cited by in corpus (23)

• Quantifying Long-Term Scientific Impact
• Reputation and Impact in Academic Careers
• Crises and collective socio-economic phenomena: simple models and challenges
• Collective credit allocation in science
• Persistence and Uncertainty in the Academic Career
• How Visibility and Divided Attention Constrain Social Contagion
• Scientific elite revisited: Patterns of productivity, collaboration, authorship and impact
• Quantifying the influence of scientists and their publications: Distinguish prestige from popularity
• From Social Data Mining to Forecasting Socio-Economic Crisis
• A Biased Review of Sociophysics
• Interdisciplinarity: A Nobel Opportunity
• Statistical regularities in the rank-citation profile of scientists
• How to Create an Innovation Accelerator
• Scientific Prizes and the Extraordinary Growth of Scientific Topics
• The Time Dimension of Science: Connecting the Past to the Future
• Quality versus quantity in scientific impact
• The citation wake of publications detects Nobel laureates' papers
• Mining and Forecasting Career Trajectories of Music Artists
• Turing Award elites revisited: patterns of productivity, collaboration, authorship and impact
• Collective dynamics behind success
• Individual and gender inequality in computer science: A career study of cohorts from 1970 to 2000
• Citation Cascade and the Evolution of Topic Relevance
• Comparison of the Research Effectiveness of Chemistry Nobelists and Fields Medalist Mathematicians with Google Scholar: the Yule-Simon Model