Related papers: Estimating achievement from fame
Newton's centuries-old wisdom of standing on the shoulders of giants raises a crucial yet underexplored question: Out of all the prior works cited by a discovery, which one is its giant? Here, we develop a novel, discipline-independent…
It is important to explore how scientists decide their research agenda and the corresponding consequences, as their decisions collectively shape contemporary science. There are studies focusing on the overall performance of individuals with…
Prior investigations have offered contrasting results on a troubling question: whether the alphabetical ordering of bylines confers citation advantages on those authors whose surnames put them first in the list. The previous studies…
We investigate whether experts possess differential expertise when making predictions. We note that this would make it possible to aggregate multiple predictions into a result that is more accurate than their consensus average, and that the…
Opportunities, such as access to education or family background, shape income inequality by influencing the chances of economic success. Unequal opportunities create uncertainty about whether success is merit- or luck-based. We examine how…
We studied the research performance of 69 countries by considering two different types of new knowledge: incremental (normal) and fundamental (radical). In principle, these two types of new knowledge should be assessed at two very different…
Over the last decade proposal success rates in the fundamental sciences have dropped significantly. Astronomy and related fields funded by NASA and NSF are no exception. Data across agencies show that this is not principally the result of a…
The citation potential is a measure of the probability of being cited. Obviously, it is different among fields of science, social science, and humanities because of systematic differences in publication and citation behaviour across…
Recent "science of science" research shows that scientific impact measures for journals and individual articles have quantifiable regularities across both time and discipline. However, little is known about the scientific impact…
The literature on gender differences in research performance seems to suggest a gap between men and women, where the former outperform the latter. Whether one agrees with the different factors proposed to explain the phenomenon, it is…
We consider the problem of ranking a set of objects based on their performance when the measurement of said performance is subject to noise. In this scenario, the performance is measured repeatedly, resulting in a range of measurements for…
In order to solve a task using reinforcement learning, it is necessary to first formalise the goal of that task as a reward function. However, for many real-world tasks, it is very difficult to manually specify a reward function that never…
With the vast majority of scientific papers now available online, this paper describes how the Web is allowing physicists and information providers to measure more accurately the impact of these papers and their authors. Provides a…
Cultural evolution theory suggests that prestige bias - whereby individuals preferentially learn from prestigious figures - has played a key role in human ecological success. However, its impact within online environments remains unclear,…
We provide scientific foundations for athletic performance prediction on an individual level, exposing the phenomenology of individual athletic running performance in the form of a low-rank model dominated by an individual power law. We…
The impact of predictive algorithms on people's lives and livelihoods has been noted in medicine, criminal justice, finance, hiring and admissions. Most of these algorithms are developed using data and human capital from highly developed…
A project (e.g., writing a collaborative research paper) is often a group effort. At the end, each contributor identifies their contribution, often verbally. The reward, however, is very frequently financial. It leads to the question of…
The constantly increasing rate at which scientific papers are published makes it difficult for researchers to identify papers that currently impact the research field of their interest. Hence, approaches to effectively identify papers of…
Science progresses by building upon previous discoveries. It is commonly believed that the impact of scientific papers, as measured by citations, is positively correlated with the impact of past discoveries built upon. However, analyzing…
We address the question to what extent the success of scientific articles is due to social influence. Analyzing a data set of over 100000 publications from the field of Computer Science, we study how centrality in the coauthorship network…