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Do great minds appear in batches?

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Abstract

Despite much scholarly fascination with the question of whether great minds appear in cycles, together with some empirical evidence that historical cycles exist, prior studies mostly disregard the “great minds” hypothesis as it relates to scientists. Rather, researchers assume a linear relation based on the argument that science is allied with the development of technology. To probe this issue further, this study uses a ranking of over 5600 scientists based on number of appearances in Google Books over a period of 200 years (1800–2000). The results point to several peak periods, particularly for scientists born in the 1850–1859, 1897–1906, or 1900–1909 periods, suggesting overall cycles of around 8 years and a positive trend in distinction that lasts around 100 years. Nevertheless, a non-parametric test to determine whether randomness can be rejected indicates that non-randomness is less apparent, although once we analyse the greatest minds overall, rejection is more likely.

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Notes

  1. For an overview of the studies related to society and creativity, see Gowan and Olson (1979).

  2. See also Kroeber (1944) and Sorokin (1957), as well as Turchin’s examinations of historical cycles (Turchin 2003; Turchin and Nefedov 2009).

  3. One analysis of a top economics journal demonstrates that the citation peak of articles is reached after 5 years (Johnston et al. 2013). McDowell (1982), in a discussion of the rate of knowledge obsolescence or depreciation reflected in the age profile of cited works in different disciplines, finds the largest decay rate in physics and chemistry (an annual average of 18.30), followed by economics (13.18), sociology and psychology (10.82), biology (8.68), history (3.85), and English (2.67).

  4. Data available from http://fame.gonzolabs.org/datasets (Adrian Veres is a co-contributor to the data set).

  5. See http://fame.gonzolabs.org/release-notes for the details on scientist selection and construction of the mD measure.

  6. Five point 3 % of scientists are classified into two or more fields.

  7. For example, the 10-year moving average mD at time t equals t −5*1/512 + t −4*9/512 + ··· + t*126/512 + ··· + t +3*9/512 + t +4*1/512.

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Acknowledgments

For advice and suggestions, thanks are due to two anonymous referees. We acknowledge financial support from the Australian Research Council (FT110100463).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Queensland Behavioural Economics Group (QuBE), School of Economics and Finance, Queensland University of Technology, GPO Box 2434, Brisbane, QLD, 4001, Australia

    Ho Fai Chan & Benno Torgler

  2. Center for Research in Economics, Management and the Arts (CREMA), Zurich, Switzerland

    Benno Torgler

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  1. Ho Fai Chan
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  2. Benno Torgler
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Correspondence to Benno Torgler.

Appendix

Appendix

See Figs. 4 and 5.

Fig. 4
figure 4

Eminence development by field based on mean mD

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Fig. 5
figure 5

Eminence development by field based on sum mD

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Chan, H.F., Torgler, B. Do great minds appear in batches?. Scientometrics 104, 475–488 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-015-1620-8

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