Quantifying the evolution of individual scientific impact.
Despite the frequent use of numerous quantitative indicators to gauge the professional impact of a scientist, little is known about how scientific impact emerges and evolves in time. Here, we quantify the changes in impact and productivity throughout a career in science, finding that impact, as measured by influential publications, is distributed randomly within a scientist's sequence of publications. This random-impact rule allows us to formulate a stochastic model that uncouples the effects of productivity, individual ability, and luck and unveils the existence of universal patterns governing the emergence of scientific success. The model assigns a unique individual parameter Q to each scientist, which is stable during a career, and it accurately predicts the evolution of a scientist's impact, from the h-index to cumulative citations, and independent recognitions, such as prizes.
Center for Complex Network Research and Physics Department, Northeastern University, Boston, MA 02115, USA.|Center for Network Science and Math Department, Central European University, Budapest, Hungary.
Roberta
R
Sinatra
Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL 60208, USA.|Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL 60208, USA.
Dashun
D
Wang
Center for Complex Network Research and Physics Department, Northeastern University, Boston, MA 02115, USA.|Department of Applied Mathematics, Université catholique de Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium.
Pierre
P
Deville
Department of Physics, University of Miami, Coral Gables, FL 33124, USA.
Chaoming
C
Song
Center for Complex Network Research and Physics Department, Northeastern University, Boston, MA 02115, USA. alb@neu.edu.|Department of Medicine, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA 02115, USA.|Center for Network Science, Central European University, Budapest, Hungary.|Center for Cancer Systems Biology, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Boston, MA 02115, USA.
Albert-László
AL
Barabási