Related papers: The effects of aging of scientists on their public…
With rising life expectancies around the world and an older scientific workforce than ever before, what does aging mean for individual scientists, and what do aging scientists mean for scientific progress as a whole? Here we examine how…
Within academia, mature researchers tend to be more senior, but do they also tend to write higher impact articles? This article assesses long-term publishing (16+ years) United States (US) researchers, contrasting them with shorter-term…
We examine the innovation of researchers with long-lived careers in Computer Science and Physics. Despite the epistemological differences between such disciplines, we consistently find that a researcher's most innovative publication occurs…
References are an essential component of research articles and therefore of scientific communication. In this study we investigate referencing (citing) behavior in five diverse fields (astronomy, mathematics, robotics, ecology and…
For decades the number of scientific publications has been rapidly increasing, effectively out-dating knowledge at a tremendous rate. Only few scientific milestones remain relevant and continuously attract citations. Here we quantify how…
In this paper, we examine the evolution of the impact of older scholarly articles. We attempt to answer four questions. First, how often are older articles cited and how has this changed over time. Second, how does the impact of older…
Fast-growing scientific publications present challenges to the scientific community. In this paper, we describe their implications to researchers. As references form explicit foundations for researchers to conduct a study, we investigate…
We analyze the publication records of individual scientists, aiming to quantify the topic switching dynamics of scientists and its influence. For each scientist, the relations among her publications are characterized via shared references.…
Science is a cumulative activity, which can manifest itself through the act of citing. Citations are also central to research evaluation, thus creating incentives for researchers to cite their own work. Using a dataset containing more than…
Analyzing a large data set of publications drawn from the most competitive journals in the natural and social sciences we show that research careers exhibit the broad distributions of individual achievement characteristic of systems in…
We study the statistics of citations from all Physical Review journals for the 110-year period 1893 until 2003. In addition to characterizing the citation distribution and identifying publications with the highest citation impact, we…
The impact and originality are two critical dimensions for evaluating scientific publications, measured by citation and disruption metrics respectively. Despite the extensive effort made to understand the statistical properties and…
The exponential growth in the number of scientific papers makes it increasingly difficult for researchers to keep track of all the publications relevant to their work. Consequently, the attention that can be devoted to individual papers,…
A scientist may publish tens or hundreds of papers over a career, but these contributions are not evenly spaced in time. Sixty years of studies on career productivity patterns in a variety of fields suggest an intuitive and universal…
Publication statistics are ubiquitous in the ratings of scientific achievement, with citation counts and paper tallies factoring into an individual's consideration for postdoctoral positions, junior faculty, tenure, and even visa status for…
Policies ensuring that research data are available on public archives are increasingly being implemented at the government [1], funding agency [2-4], and journal [5,6] level. These policies are predicated on the idea that authors are poor…
Scientific impact plays a central role in the evaluation of the output of scholars, departments, and institutions. A widely used measure of scientific impact is citations, with a growing body of literature focused on predicting the number…
As a simple means for comparing and - if possible - predicting scientific impacts of different researchers working in the same field, we suggest comparing their "sales curves". A sales curve is the number of citations of the researcher's…
The shift from individual effort to collaborative output has benefited science, with scientific work pursued collaboratively having increasingly led to more highly impactful research than that pursued individually. However, understanding of…
Science is a growing system, exhibiting ~4% annual growth in publications and ~1.8% annual growth in the number of references per publication. Combined these trends correspond to a 12-year doubling period in the total supply of references,…