Abstract
Despite the frequent use of numerous quantitative indicators to gauge the professional impact of a scientist, little is known about how scientific impact emerges and evolves in time. Here, we quantify the changes in impact and productivity throughout a career in science, finding that impact, as measured by influential publications, is distributed randomly within a scientist's sequence of publications. This random-impact rule allows us to formulate a stochastic model that uncouples the effects of productivity, individual ability, and luck and unveils the existence of universal patterns governing the emergence of scientific success.The model assigns a unique individual parameter Q to each scientist, which is stable during a career, and it accurately predicts the evolution of a scientist's impact, from the h-index to cumulative citations, and independent recognitions, such as prizes.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Article number | aaf5239 |
| Journal | Science |
| Volume | 354 |
| Issue number | 6312 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Nov 4 2016 |
Funding
The Physical Review data set can be requested from the APS at http:// journals.aps.org/datasets. Data with the result of the disambiguation procedure, described in section S1.1, can be found as supplementary materials. An interactive visualization of the data sets, focusing on the random-impact rule, can be found at www.barabasilab.com/ scienceofsuccess/. We thank J. A. Evans, S. Fortunato, S. Lehmann, B. Uzzi, B. Coutinho, S. Gil, E. Guney, J. Huang, J. Menche, F. Simini, M. Szell, and all other colleagues at the Center for Complex Network Research (CCNR) for the valuable discussions and comments. We thank H. Shen for the help with the credit share analysis. R.S. and A.-L.B. were supported by Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) grants FA9550-15-1-0077 and FA9550-15-1-0364. A.-L.B. was also supported by the Future and Emerging Technologies Project 317 532 "Multiplex" financed by the European Commission. D.W. was supported by AFOSR grant FA9550-15-1-0162 and a Young Investigator Award. P.D. acknowledges support by the National Foundation for Scientific Research and the Research Department of the Communauté française de Belgique (Large Graph Concerted Research Action). R.S. developed the majority of this work during her stay at the CCNR, supported by the J. S. McDonnell Foundation. All authors designed and did the research. R.S. analyzed the empirical data, developed the models and controls, and performed the calculations. A.-L.B. was the lead writer of the manuscript.
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- General