See further upon the giants: Quantifying intellectual lineage in science

Abstract

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. Peer Review https://publons.com/publon/10.1162/qss_a_00186

Data, measurement and empirical methods in the science of science

“…Second, scientists use citations to trace knowledge flows. Each citation in a paper is a link to specific previous work from which we can proxy how new discoveries draw upon existing ideas 76,93 and how knowledge flows between fields of science 94,95 , research institutions 96 , regions and nations [97][98][99] , and individuals 81 . Combinations of citation linkages can also approximate novelty 15 , disruptiveness 17,100 and interdisciplinarity 55,95,101,102 .…”