Thoughts on uncitedness: Nobel laureates and Fields medalists as case studies

Abstract

Contrary to what one might expect, Nobel laureates andFields medalists have a rather large fraction (10% or more) of uncited publications.This is the case for (in total) 75 examined researchers from the fields of mathematics (Fields medalists), physics, chemistry, and physiology or medicine (Nobel laureates). We study several indicators for these researchers, including the h-index, total number of publications, average number of citations per publication, the number (and fraction) of uncited publications, and their interrelations. The most remarkable result is a positive correlation between the h-index and the number of uncited articles.We also present a Lotkaian model, which partially explains the empirically found regularities.

The science that’s never been cited

“…In 2012, for instance, Petr Heneberg, a biologist at Charles University in Prague, decided to examine the Web of Science records of 13 Nobel prizewinners 5 , to scrutinize a preposterous-sounding paper that claimed that around 10% of Nobel laureates' research was uncited 6 . His first glance at the Web of Science suggested a number closer to 1.6%.…”

The phenomenon of all-elements-sleeping-beauties in scientific literature

“…In scientific literature, there is the phenomenon of delayed recognition, where papers that initially are unappreciated but later go on to be recognized as significant are referred to as premature discoveries (Stent 1972;Wyatt 1975), resisted discoveries (Barher 1961), delayed recognition (Cole 1970), or sleeping beauties (Van Raan 2004; Glänzel and Garfield 2004;Burrell 2005;Braun et al 2010;Egghe et al 2011). We find four special cases, in which sleeping beauties seem to be injured by spindles so that they fall into sleep then are awakened by princes.…”

Alternative thoughts on uncitedness

“…Egghe, Guns, and Rousseau () presented a fascinating empirical study of various relations between publications and citations of a selective set of eminent scientists, all of whom are either Nobel laureates or Fields medallists (the equivalent in Mathematics). In the article, various relationships are illustrated, but only qualitatively via graphical representations, and correlations are not reported.…”

“…G uns, and R . R ousseau () noted that in a study of some eminent scientists, many of them had a fair proportion of papers which were uncited and found this to be surprising. Here, we use the stochastic publication/citation model of Q .…”