title: Reputation and impact in academic careers.
abstract: 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 career growth of an individual remains poorly understood, despite recent proliferation of quantitative research evaluation methods. Here, we develop an original framework for measuring how a publication's citation rate Δc depends on the reputation of its central author i, in addition to its net citation count c. To estimate the strength of the reputation effect, we perform a longitudinal analysis on the careers of 450 highly cited scientists, using the total citations Ci of each scientist as his/her reputation measure. We find a citation crossover c×, which distinguishes the strength of the reputation effect. For publications with c < c×, the author's reputation is found to dominate the annual citation rate. Hence, a new publication may gain a significant early advantage corresponding to roughly a 66% increase in the citation rate for each tenfold increase in Ci. However, the reputation effect becomes negligible for highly cited publications meaning that, for c ≥ c×, the citation rate measures scientific impact more transparently. In addition, we have developed a stochastic reputation model, which is found to reproduce numerous statistical observations for real careers, thus providing insight into the microscopic mechanisms underlying cumulative advantage in science.
authors.affiliation: Laboratory for the Analysis of Complex Economic Systems, Institutions, Markets, Technologies (IMT) Lucca Institute for Advanced Studies, 55100 Lucca, Italy; hes@bu.edu petersen.xander@gmail.com santo.fortunato@aalto.fi.
authors.forename: Alexander Michael
authors.initials: AM
authors.lastname: Petersen
authors.affiliation: Department of Biomedical Engineering and Computational Science, Aalto University School of Science, FI-00076 Aalto, Finland; hes@bu.edu petersen.xander@gmail.com santo.fortunato@aalto.fi.
authors.forename: Santo
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Fortunato
authors.affiliation: Department of Biomedical Engineering and Computational Science, Aalto University School of Science, FI-00076 Aalto, Finland;
authors.forename: Raj K
authors.initials: RK
authors.lastname: Pan
authors.affiliation: Department of Biomedical Engineering and Computational Science, Aalto University School of Science, FI-00076 Aalto, Finland;
authors.forename: Kimmo
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Kaski
authors.affiliation: Laboratory of Innovation Management and Economics, IMT Lucca Institute for Advanced Studies, 55100 Lucca, Italy;
authors.forename: Orion
authors.initials: O
authors.lastname: Penner
authors.affiliation: Laboratory for the Analysis of Complex Economic Systems, Institutions, Markets, Technologies (IMT) Lucca Institute for Advanced Studies, 55100 Lucca, Italy;
authors.forename: Armando
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Rungi
authors.affiliation: Laboratory of Innovation Management and Economics, IMT Lucca Institute for Advanced Studies, 55100 Lucca, Italy; Department of Managerial Economics, Strategy and Innovation, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, 3000 Leuven, Belgium; and.
authors.forename: Massimo
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Riccaboni
authors.affiliation: Center for Polymer Studies and Department of Physics, Boston University, Boston, MA 02215 hes@bu.edu petersen.xander@gmail.com santo.fortunato@aalto.fi.
authors.forename: H Eugene
authors.initials: HE
authors.lastname: Stanley
authors.affiliation: Laboratory for the Analysis of Complex Economic Systems, Institutions, Markets, Technologies (IMT) Lucca Institute for Advanced Studies, 55100 Lucca, Italy; Center for Polymer Studies and Department of Physics, Boston University, Boston, MA 02215.
authors.forename: Fabio
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Pammolli
mesh_terms: D015706:Bibliometrics; D002322:Career Mobility; D003198:Computer Simulation; D015233:Models, Statistical; D009010:Monte Carlo Method; D011643:Publishing / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D012106:Research / Q000592:standards* / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D012108:Research Personnel / Q000592:standards*
keywords: Matthew effect; computational sociology; networks of networks; science of science; sociophysics