TY  - JOUR
UR  - http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1323111111
JF  - Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
IS  - 43
AV  - none
TI  - Reputation and impact in academic careers
KW  - computational sociology; science of science; networks of networks; Matthew effect; sociophysics

Y1  - 2014/10//
N2  - Reputation is an important social construct in science, which enables informed quality assessments of both publications and careers of scientists in the absence of complete systemic information. However, the relation between reputation and career growth of an individual remains poorly understood, despite recent proliferation of quantitative research evaluation methods. Here, we develop an original framework for measuring how a publication?s citation rate ?c depends on the reputation of its central author i, in addition to its net citation count c. To estimate the strength of the reputation effect, we perform a longitudinal analysis on the careers of 450 highly cited scientists, using the total citations Ci of each scientist as his/her reputation measure. We find a citation crossover c×, which distinguishes the strength of the reputation effect. For publications with c < c×, the author?s reputation is found to dominate the annual citation rate. Hence, a new publication may gain a significant early advantage corresponding to roughly a 66% increase in the citation rate for each tenfold increase in Ci. However, the reputation effect becomes negligible for highly cited publications meaning that, for c ??c×, the citation rate measures scientific impact more transparently. In addition, we have developed a stochastic reputation model, which is found to reproduce numerous statistical observations for real careers, thus providing insight into the microscopic mechanisms underlying cumulative advantage in science. 
SP  - 15316
A1  - Petersen, Alexander M.
A1  - Fortunato, Santo
A1  - Pan, Raj K.
A1  - Kaski, Kimmo
A1  - Penner, Orion
A1  - Rungi, Armando
A1  - Riccaboni, Massimo
A1  - Stanley, H. Eugene
A1  - Pammolli, Fabio
SN  - 1091-6490
EP  - 15321
ID  - eprints2370
VL  - 111
ER  -