Related papers: Estimating achievement from fame
We study empirically how the fame of WWI fighter-pilot aces, measured in numbers of web pages mentioning them, is related to their achievement, measured in numbers of opponent aircraft destroyed. We find that on the average fame grows…
We study empirically how fame of WWI fighter-pilot aces, measured in numbers of web pages mentioning them, is related to their achievement or merit, measured in numbers of opponent aircraft destroyed. We find that on the average fame grows…
Following a recent idea, to measure fame by the number of \Google hits found in a search on the WWW, we study the relation between fame (\Google hits) and merit (number of papers posted on an electronic archive) for a random group of…
We study the fame distribution of scientists and other social groups as measured by the number of Google hits garnered by individuals in the population. Past studies have found that the fame distribution decays either in power-law…
Fame, popularity and celebrity status, frequently used tokens of success, are often loosely related to, or even divorced from professional performance. This dichotomy is partly rooted in the difficulty to distinguish performance, an…
We studied the distribution of World War I fighter pilots by the number of victories they were credited with, along with casualty reports. Using the maximum entropy method we obtained the underlying distribution of pilots by their skill. We…
We investigate a pool of international chess title holders born between 1901 and 1943. Using Elo ratings we compute for every player his expected score in a game with a randomly selected player from the pool. We use this figure as player's…
The number of citations is a widely used metric to evaluate the scientific credit of papers, scientists and journals. However, it does happen that a paper with fewer citations from prestigious scientists is of higher influence than papers…
The exponentially growing number of scientific papers stimulates a discussion on the interplay between quantity and quality in science. In particular, one may wonder which publication strategy may offer more chances of success: publishing…
Fame and celebrity play an ever-increasing role in our culture. However, despite the cultural and economic importance of fame and its gradations, there exists no consensus method for quantifying the fame of an individual, or of comparing…
The impact of individual scientists is commonly quantified using citation-based measures. The most common such measure is the h-index. A scientist's h-index affects hiring, promotion, and funding decisions, and thus shapes the progress of…
Reputation is an important social construct in science, which enables informed quality assessments of both publications and careers of scientists in the absence of complete systemic information. However, the relation between reputation and…
Citation analysis does not generally take the quality of citations into account: all citations are weighted equally irrespective of source. However, a scholar may be highly cited but not highly regarded: popularity and prestige are not…
The impact made by a scientific paper on the work of other academics has many established metrics, including metrics based on citation counts and social media commenting. However, determination of the impact of a scientific paper on the…
Currently the ranking of scientists is based on the $h$-index, which is widely perceived as an imprecise and simplistic though still useful metric. We find that the $h$-index actually favours modestly performing researchers and propose a…
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…
Science prizes purportedly reward innovation and explorations of new phenomena. Yet, in practice prizes may inadvertently divert resources from similarly impactful but less celebrated scholars. Despite this paradox, knowledge of how…
Understanding the qualitative patterns of research endeavor of scientific authors in terms of publication count and their impact (citation) is important in order to quantify success trajectories. Here, we examine the career profile of…
Throughout history, a relatively small number of individuals have made a profound and lasting impact on science and society. Despite long-standing, multi-disciplinary interests in understanding careers of elite scientists, there have been…
Humanity has been fascinated by the pursuit of fortune since time immemorial, and many successful outcomes benefit from strokes of luck. But success is subject to complexity, uncertainty, and change - and at times becoming increasingly…