Reputation and impact in academic careers

By Alexander M. Petersen, Santo Fortunato, Raj Kumar Pan, Kimmo K. Kaski, Orion Penner, Massimo Riccaboni, H. Eugene Stanley, Fabio Pammolli. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2013

305 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Significance Over a scientist’s career, a reputation is developed, a standing within a research community, based largely upon the quantity and quality of his/her publications. Here, we develop a framework for quantifying the influence author reputation has on a publication’s future impact. We find author reputation plays a key role in driving a paper’s citation count early in its citation life cycle, before a tipping point, after which reputation has much less influence relative to the paper’s citation count. In science, perceived quality, and decisions made based on those perceptions, is increasingly linked to citation counts. Shedding light on the complex mechanisms driving these quantitative measures facilitates not only better evaluation of scientific outputs but also a more transparent evaluation of the scientists producing them. Reputation is an important social construct in science, which enables informed quality assessments of both publications and careers of scientists in the absence of complete systemic information. However, the relation between reputation and career growth of an individual remains poorly understood, despite recent proliferation of quantitative research evaluation methods. Here, we develop an original framework for measuring how a publication’s citation rate Δc depends on the reputation of its central author i, in addition to its net citation count c. To estimate the strength of the reputation effect, we perform a longitudinal analysis on the careers of 450 highly cited scientists, using the total citations Ci of each scientist as his/her reputation measure. We find a citation crossover c×, which distinguishes the strength of the reputation effect. For publications with c < c×, the author’s reputation is found to dominate the annual citation rate. Hence, a new publication may gain a significant early advantage corresponding to roughly a 66% increase in the citation rate for each tenfold increase in Ci. However, the reputation effect becomes negligible for highly cited publications meaning that, for c ≥ c×, the citation rate measures scientific impact more transparently. In addition, we have developed a stochastic reputation model, which is found to reproduce numerous statistical observations for real careers, thus providing insight into the microscopic mechanisms underlying cumulative advantage in science.

Subfields: Information Systems and Management, Statistics and Probability

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/22fb4ce8a05452330b0a011d4f1604d6ee0336aa

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Citations in the corpus

Flying the nest: how the home department shapes researchers’ career paths (2017, unknown): “Researchers trained as PhDs or postdocs by highly reputed mentors will have a publication and reputation advantage and may value academic career paths more than researchers from other groups (Long and McGinnis 1987; Petersen et al. 2014).”
Defining and identifying Sleeping Beauties in science (2015, background): “Several factors can potentially affect the amount of citations accumulated by a paper over time, including its quality, timeliness, and potential to trigger further inquiries (9), the reputation of its authors (16, 17), as well as its topic and age (8).”
The science of science: from the perspective of complex systems (2017, background): “With the accelerating access to big data of scientific publications, numerous models have been developed in recent years to model the process of scientific discoveries [55,132].”
Style in the Age of Instagram: Predicting Success within the Fashion Industry using Social Media (2015, background): “Similarly to the careers of scientists [34], fashion models also beneﬁt from strong cumulative advantage effects, by which small differences in prestige between competing individuals get ampli-ﬁed, for example by means of word of mouth [39, 42, 19].”