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How Citation Boosts Promote Scientific Paradigm Shifts and Nobel Prizes

By PLoS ONE • on May 4, 2011

by Amin Mazloumian, Young-Ho Eom, Dirk Helbing, Sergi Lozano, Santo Fortunato

Nobel Prizes are commonly seen to be among the most prestigious achievements of
our times. Based on mining several million citations, we quantitatively analyze
the processes driving paradigm shifts in science. We find that groundbreaking
discoveries of Nobel Prize Laureates and other famous scientists are not only
acknowledged by many citations of their landmark papers. Surprisingly, they also
boost the citation rates of their previous publications. Given that innovations
must outcompete the rich-gets-richer effect for scientific citations, it turns
out that they can make their way only through citation cascades. A quantitative
analysis reveals how and why they happen. Science appears to behave like a
self-organized critical system, in which citation cascades of all sizes occur,
from continuous scientific progress all the way up to scientific revolutions,
which change the way we see our world. Measuring the “boosting
effect” of landmark papers, our analysis reveals how new ideas and new
players can make their way and finally triumph in a world dominated by
established paradigms. The underlying “boost factor” is also useful
to discover scientific breakthroughs and talents much earlier than through
classical citation analysis, which by now has become a widespread method to
measure scientific excellence, influencing scientific careers and the
distribution of research funds. Our findings reveal patterns of collective
social behavior, which are also interesting from an attention economics
perspective. Understanding the origin of scientific authority may therefore
ultimately help to explain how social influence comes about and why the value of
goods depends so strongly on the attention they attract.