“Sparking” and “Igniting” Key Publications of 2020 Nobel Prize Laureates

Abstract

PurposeThis article aims to determine the percentage of “Sparking” articles among the work of this year’s Nobel Prize winners in medicine, physics, and chemistry.Design/methodology/approachWe focus on under-cited influential research among the key publications as mentioned by the Nobel Prize Committee for the 2020 Noble Prize laureates. Specifically, we extracted data from the Web of Science, and calculated the Sparking Indices using the formulas as proposed by Hu and Rousseau in 2016 and 2017. In addition, we identified another type of igniting articles based on the notion in 2017.FindingsIn the fields of medicine and physics, the proportions of articles with sparking characteristics share 78.571% and 68.75% respectively, yet, in chemistry 90% articles characterized by “igniting”. Moreover, the two types of articles share more than 93% in the work of the Nobel Prize included in this study.Research limitationsOur research did not cover the impact of topic, socio-political, and author’s reputation on the Sparking Indices.Practical implicationsOur study shows that the Sparking Indices truly reflect influence of the best research work, so it can be used to detect under-cited influential articles, as well as identifying fundamental work.Originality/valueOur findings suggest that the Sparking Indices have good applicability for research evaluation.

Do elite scientists play a key role in the genesis of transformative research of “sparking type”? An investigation in the science of science

“…For this reason, scholars have proposed to use percentiles instead of averages, such as the top 10% of the most cited papers (Bornmann 2013) and the top 1% of the most highly cited articles (National Science Board 2012) to evaluate the quality of research. The same approach has proved effective in previous research (Hu and Rousseau 2016;2017;Xi, Rousseau and Hu 2021).…”

“…Physiology or Medicine, and Physics. This is because in a previous study (Xi et al 2021), it was found that 78.57 percent and 68.75 percent of the 2020 Nobel Prize-winning publications in Physiology or Medicine and in Physics respectively were of the sparking type. Specifically, the data collection process, comprising five steps is illustrated in Figure 3.…”

Is low interdisciplinarity of references an unexpected characteristic of Nobel Prize winning research?

“…Traditionally, direct citations are used to judge the impact of TR (Huang et al, 2013;Ponomarev et al, 2014). Yet, this approach may misjudge the value of TR because scientific contributions are not always directly visible (Hu & Rousseau, 2016Xi et al, 2021). For instance, the Chinese scientist Youyou Tu received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2015 for the discovery of artemisinin against malaria.…”