ArticleJournal of the Royal Society, Interface2020
Scientific elite revisited: patterns of productivity, collaboration, authorship and impact.
Article in Journal of the Royal Society, Interface, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 23 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
23 citing papers in PubMed, 121 citations in OpenAlex.
- Indigenization and inclusion in Chinese academia.Nature human behaviour · 2026Article
- The publish or perish, publish and perish, publish then perish, and now retract and perish cultures in academia.Naunyn-Schmiedeberg's archives of pharmacology · 2026Article
- Article
- Tenure and research trajectories.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- A multidimensional research productivity dataset of 21Scientific data · 2025Article
- How the Nobel Committee for Chemistry Has Shaped the Nobel Prize: Historical Trends Based on the Nobel Prize Nomination Archive.ACS omega · 2025Article
- Sustainable Practices in Anti-VEGF Therapy: A 15-Year Bibliometric Analysis of Ranibizumab for Age-Related Macular Degeneration.Journal of ophthalmology · 2025Article
- Article
- Trajectories of biomedical research leading to Nobel Prize-winning discoveries.Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences · 2024Article
- Early-career factors largely determine the future impact of prominent researchers: evidence across eight scientific fields.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Impact of major awards on the subsequent work of their recipients.Royal Society open science · 2023Article
- Modeling a successful citation trajectory structure for scholar's impact evaluation in Israeli academia.Heliyon · 2023Article
- Article
- Analyzing and predicting success of professional musicians.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Impactful scientists have higher tendency to involve collaborators in new topics.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- Synchronized bursts of productivity and success in individual careers.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- The Colombian scientific elite-Science mapping and a comparison with Nobel Prize laureates using a composite citation indicator.PloS one · 2022Article
- NIH Funding, Research Productivity, and Scientific Impact: a 20-Year Study.Journal of general internal medicine · 2022Article
- Relationship between early-career collaboration among researchers and future funding success in Japanese academia.PloS one · 2022Article
- Winners and runners-up alike?-a comparison between awardees and special mention recipients of the most reputable science award in Colombia via a composite citation indicator.Humanities & social sciences communications · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
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 limited attempts for a quantitative, career-level analysis. Here, we leverage a comprehensive dataset we assembled, allowing us to trace the entire career histories of nearly all Nobel laureates in physics, chemistry, and physiology or medicine over the past century. We find that, although Nobel laureates were energetic producers from the outset, producing works that garner unusually high impact, their careers before winning the prize follow relatively similar patterns to those of ordinary scientists, being characterized by hot streaks and increasing reliance on collaborations. We also uncovered notable variations along their careers, often associated with the Nobel Prize, including shifting coauthorship structure in the prize-winning work, and a significant but temporary dip in the impact of work they produce after winning the Nobel Prize. Together, these results document quantitative patterns governing the careers of scientific elites, offering an empirical basis for a deeper understanding of the hallmarks of exceptional careers in science.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.