Abstract
The contributions of leading scientists, such as Nobel Prize winners often play an important role in the progress of mankind. In this article, we propose new indices to recognize foundational work in science. Based on case studies of publications by 2016 Nobel Prize winners we make a distinction between two types of fundamental contributions. In a metaphoric way we refer to them as directly igniting or sparking. Our work contains an important message for research evaluation. Besides short-term evaluations it is also important to perform longer term evaluations, otherwise work of Nobel class may fall under the radar and is not rewarded according to its scientific value. It is further suggested that scientometric investigations should not overlook transitional characteristics of scientific progress.
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Acknowledgements
This work is supported by a grant of the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC Grant No. 71573225). The authors would like to thank Zhang Yuning and Hu Xiaoyue for their help in data collection.
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Hu, X., Rousseau, R. Nobel Prize winners 2016: Igniting or sparking foundational publications?. Scientometrics 110, 1053–1063 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-016-2205-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-016-2205-x