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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.…
Luck is considered to be a crucial ingredient to achieve impact in all creative domains, despite their diversity. For instance, in science, the movie industry, music, and art, the occurrence of the highest impact work and of a hot streak…
Social influence is ubiquitous in cultural markets, from book recommendations in Amazon, to song popularities in iTunes and the ranking of newspaper articles in the online edition of the New York Times to mention only a few. Yet social…
We propose a simple model of an idealized online cultural market in which $N$ items, endowed with a hidden quality metric, are recommended to users by a ranking algorithm possibly biased by the current items' popularity. Our goal is to…
Citation metrics are becoming pervasive in the quantitative evaluation of scholars, journals and institutions. More then ever before, hiring, promotion, and funding decisions rely on a variety of impact metrics that cannot disentangle…
The pursuit of knowledge is the permanent goal of human beings. Scientific literature, as the major medium that carries knowledge between scientists, exhibits explosive growth during the last century. Despite the frequent use of many…
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…
Do highly productive researchers have significantly higher probability to produce top cited papers? Or does the increased productivity in science only result in a sea of irrelevant papers as a perverse effect of competition and the…
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…
Recent studies in the science of success have shown that the highest-impact works of scientists or artists happen randomly and uniformly over the individual's career. Yet in certain artistic endeavours, such as acting in films and TV,…
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…
Social scientists have long sought to understand why certain people, items, or options become more popular than others. One seemingly intuitive theory is that inherent value drives popularity. An alternative theory claims that popularity is…
Classifying researchers according to the quality of their published work rather than the quantity is a curtail issue. We attempt to introduce a new formula of the percentage range to be used for evaluating qualitatively the researchers'…
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…
Algorithms that favor popular items are used to help us select among many choices, from engaging articles on a social media news feed to songs and books that others have purchased, and from top-raked search engine results to highly-cited…
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…
Real-world creative processes ranging from art to science rely on social feedback-loops between selection and creation. Yet, the effects of popularity feedback on collective creativity remain poorly understood. We investigate how popularity…
A model is proposed for the creation and transmission of scientific knowledge, based on the network of citations among research articles. The model allows to assign to each article a nonnegative value for its creativity, i. e. its creation…