Physics (Internal)

Coevolution of Reputation and Impact across the Academic Career

This event is part of the Biophysics/Condensed Matter Seminar Series.

Abstract: The cumulative citations to a paper is a universal measure of impact, but the role that author reputation plays in the life-cycle of the citation rate remains poorly understood.

As a result, models of citation dynamics and career trajectories overlook the collaboration and reputation spillovers constitute a cumulative advantage underlying the competitive aspects of science. To better understand the reputation effect in science, we analyze the longitudinal citation dynamics of 350 leading scientists from biology, physics, and mathematics.

We uncover statistical regularities in the evolution of productivity and impact which we use as benchmarks for a theoretical model of career growth that we test and validate on real careers. Our model incorporates the life-cycle effect for individual papers, the cumulative advantage arising from scientific reputation, and the preferential attachment effect for citation dynamics. We find that the author reputation effect dominates in the initial phase of the citation life-cycle, but that the preferential attachment mechanism emerges as the main component behind the sustained citation rate of highly cited papers. Comparing between the three disciplines, we show that the impact life-cycle differs between fields: the axiomatic discoveries in mathematics have a very long shelf-life, whereas the rapid pace in biology and physics results in a shorter half-life despite the intense citation rate in the field.