ArticleNature communications2021
Understanding the onset of hot streaks across artistic, cultural, and scientific careers.
Article in Nature communications, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 24 papers.
What it found
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Who cites it
24 citing papers in PubMed.
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- Tenure and research trajectories.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Assessing the scientific and economic impacts of the experiments conducted onboard the International Space Station.NPJ microgravity · 2025Article
- Creativity across domains: Thoughts in Science, Engineering, Mathematics, Computer Science, Technology, and Art.PNAS nexus · 2025Article
- Investigating the diversity and stylization of contemporary user generated visual arts in the complexity entropy plane.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Relationship Between Hybrid Arts-Based CBT-CP Intervention and Personality Dimensions in Patients with Non-Malignant Chronic Pain: Evidence from a Non-Randomized Control Trial.Healthcare (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- The pivot penalty in research.Nature · 2025Article
- Structure, motion, and multiscale search of traveling networks.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Collective dynamics behind success.Nature communications · 2024Review
- Mid-career pitfall of consecutive success in science.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Network community detection via neural embeddings.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Quantifying hierarchy and prestige in US ballet academies as social predictors of career success.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Data, measurement and empirical methods in the science of science.Nature human behaviour · 2023Review
- SciSciNet: A large-scale open data lake for the science of science research.Scientific data · 2023Article
- Surprising combinations of research contents and contexts are related to impact and emerge with scientific outsiders from distant disciplines.Nature communications · 2023Article
- Quantifying human performance in chess.Scientific reports · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Across a range of creative domains, individual careers are characterized by hot streaks, which are bursts of high-impact works clustered together in close succession. Yet it remains unclear if there are any regularities underlying the beginning of hot streaks. Here, we analyze career histories of artists, film directors, and scientists, and develop deep learning and network science methods to build high-dimensional representations of their creative outputs. We find that across all three domains, individuals tend to explore diverse styles or topics before their hot streak, but become notably more focused after the hot streak begins. Crucially, hot streaks appear to be associated with neither exploration nor exploitation behavior in isolation, but a particular sequence of exploration followed by exploitation, where the transition from exploration to exploitation closely traces the onset of a hot streak. Overall, these results may have implications for identifying and nurturing talents across a wide range of creative domains.
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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.