Related papers: A mathematical theory of fame
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…
We report a method for estimating people's achievement based on their fame. Earlier we discovered (cond-mat/0310049) that fame of fighter pilot aces (measured as number of Google hits) grows exponentially with their achievement (number of…
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 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 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 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…
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…
A dynamic memory model is proposed in which an agent ``learns'' a new agent by means of recommendation. The agents can also ``remember'' and ``forget''. The memory size is decreased while the population size is kept constant. ``Fame''…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Recent research has found that select scientists have a disproportional share of highly cited papers. Researchers reasoned that this could not have happened if success in science was random and introduced a hidden parameter Q, or talent, to…
The largely dominant meritocratic paradigm of highly competitive Western cultures is rooted on the belief that success is due mainly, if not exclusively, to personal qualities such as talent, intelligence, skills, efforts or risk taking.…
The Matthew effect refers to the adage written some two-thousand years ago in the Gospel of St. Matthew: "For to all those who have, more will be given." Even two millennia later, this idiom is used by sociologists to qualitatively describe…
Did celebrity last longer in 1929, 1992 or 2009? We investigate the phenomenon of fame by mining a collection of news articles that spans the twentieth century, and also perform a side study on a collection of blog posts from the last 10…
For several decades, a leading paradigm of how to quantitatively assess scientific research has been the analysis of the aggregated citation information in a set of scientific publications. Although the representation of this information as…
Numerical data for the distribution of citations are examined for: (i) papers published in 1981 in journals which are catalogued by the Institute for Scientific Information (783,339 papers) and (ii) 20 years of publications in Physical…
We present empirical data on misprints in citations to twelve high-profile papers. The great majority of misprints are identical to misprints in articles that earlier cited the same paper. The distribution of the numbers of misprint…
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…