Related papers: Consistency pays off in science
As the increasing complexity of large-scale research requires the combined efforts of scientists with expertise in different fields, the advantages and costs of interdisciplinary scholarship have taken center stage in current debates on…
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…
Despite all its well-known flaws and calls for its dismissal, the notorious $h$-index is still used in many instances when awarding grants, or promoting and hiring scientists. To address this, I set out to devise a better index, with the…
In this research, we analyze the relationship between publishing productivity and access to highly prestigious journals, treating publishing in top journals as a stratification mechanism selecting publishing elites. We study N = 144,314…
I here propose an index that links the number of papers a researcher has published with impact factors (IFs) of the journals that publish these papers. A researcher is said to have an index z if totally z of his/her papers are published in…
We examine the tension between academic impact - the volume of citations received by publications - and scientific disruption. Intuitively, one would expect disruptive scientific work to be rewarded by high volumes of citations and,…
Researchers are often evaluated by citation-based metrics. Such metrics can inform hiring, promotion, and funding decisions. Concerns have been expressed that popular citation-based metrics incentivize researchers to maximize the production…
The ability to attract and retain talented professors is a distinctive competence of world-class universities and a source of competitive advantage. The ratio of top scientists to academic staff could therefore be an indicator of the…
Empirical evidence shows that co-authored publications achieve higher visibility and impact. The aim of the current work is to test for the existence of a similar correlation for Italian publications. We also verify if such correlation…
In science as elsewhere, attention is a limited resource and scientists compete with one another to produce the most exciting, novel and impactful results. We develop a game-theoretic model to explore how such competition influences the…
Despite decades of research, the relationship between the quality of science and the value of inventions has remained unclear. We present the result of a large-scale matching exercise between 4.8 million patent families and 43 million…
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…
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…
Physics is one of the most successful endeavors in science. Being a prototypic big science it also reflects the growing tendency for scientific collaborations. Utilizing 250,000 papers from ArXiv.org a prepublishing platform prevalent in…
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…
Team science dominates scientific knowledge production, but what makes academic teams successful? Using temporal data on 25.2 million publications and 31.8 million authors, we propose a novel network-driven approach to identify and study…
The present paper takes its place in the stream of studies that analyze the effect of interdisciplinarity on the impact of research output. Unlike previous studies, in this study the interdisciplinarity of the publications is not inferred…
We describe a simple model of how a publication's citations change over time, based on pure-birth stochastic processes with a linear cumulative advantage effect. The model is applied to citation data from the Physical Review corpus provided…
Citation metrics are the best tools for research assessments. However, current metrics may be misleading in research systems that pursue simultaneously different goals, such as the advance of science and incremental innovations, because…
Scientific institutions play a crucial role in driving intellectual, social, and technological progress. Their capacity to innovate depends mainly on their ability to attract, retain, and nurture scientific talent and ultimately make it…