Newton's centuries-old wisdom of standing on the shoulders of giants raises a crucial yet underexplored question: Out of all the prior works cited by a discovery, which one is its giant? Here, we develop a novel, discipline-independent method to identify the giant for any individual paper, allowing us to systematically examine the role and characteristics of giants in science. We find that across disciplines, about 95% of papers stand on the shoulders of giants, yet the weight of scientific progress rests on relatively few shoulders. Defining a new measure of giant index, we find that, while papers with high citations are more likely to be giants, for papers with the same citations, their giant index sharply predicts a paper's future impact and prize-winning probabilities. Giants tend to originate from both small and large teams, being either highly disruptive or highly developmental. And papers that did not have a giant but later became a giant tend to be home-run papers that are highly disruptive to science. Given the crucial importance of citation-based measures in science, the developed concept of giants may offer a useful new dimension in assessing scientific impact that goes beyond sheer citation counts.
翻译:牛顿数百年来的智慧是站在巨人的肩膀上,而科学进步的份量却相对较少。我们发现一个至关重要的、但却未得到充分探讨的问题:在一项发现所引用的所有先前的作品中,一个是其巨型的发现,一个是其巨型的?在这里,我们开发了一种新颖的、无纪律的独立的方法来识别巨型的单纸,让我们能够系统地检查巨型科学的作用和特征。我们发现,跨学科的论文中,大约95%的论文站在巨型的肩膀上,而科学进步的重心却在相对较少的肩膀上。定义一个巨型指数的新尺度,我们发现,具有高引用率的论文更有可能成为巨型的巨型,对于具有相同引用的论文来说,其巨型指数强烈地预测了纸的未来影响和得奖概率的概率。巨型人物往往来自小型和大型团队,具有高度的干扰性或高度发展性。那些没有巨型但后来又成为了巨型的本土运行的论文往往成为对科学具有高度破坏性的本土论文。鉴于以引力为基础的措施的极端重要性,因此巨型概念在评估科学影响之外。