Abstract
The exponentially growing number of scientific papers stimulates a discussion on the interplay between quantity and quality in science. In particular, one may wonder which publication strategy may offer more chances of success: publishing lots of papers, producing a few hit papers, or something in between. Here we tackle this question by studying the scientific portfolios of Nobel Prize laureates. A comparative analysis of different citation-based indicators of individual impact suggests that the best path to success may rely on consistently producing high-quality work. Such a pattern is especially rewarded by a new metric, the E-index, which identifies excellence better than state-of-the-art measures.
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Author notes
Handling Editor: Ludo Waltman
© 2023 Şirag Erkol, Satyaki Sikdar, Filippo Radicchi, and Santo Fortunato. Published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license.
2023
Şirag Erkol, Satyaki Sikdar, Filippo Radicchi, and Santo Fortunato
This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. For a full description of the license, please visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode.