Understanding the onset of hot streaks across artistic, cultural, and scientific careers
Lu Liu, Nima Dehmamy, Jillian Chown, C. Lee Giles, Dashun Wang

TL;DR
This study uncovers a universal pattern in creative careers where hot streaks begin after a specific sequence of exploration followed by exploitation, revealing a regularity in the onset of impactful creative periods across domains.
Contribution
The paper introduces a novel computational approach combining deep learning and network science to analyze career trajectories across multiple creative fields, revealing a common pattern in hot streak onset.
Findings
Hot streaks are preceded by diverse exploration behaviors.
The transition from exploration to exploitation marks hot streak onset.
Universal pattern observed across arts, film, and science domains.
Abstract
Hot streaks dominate the main impact of creative careers. Despite their ubiquitous nature across a wide range of creative domains, it remains unclear if there is any regularity underlying the beginning of hot streaks. Here, we develop computational methods using deep learning and network science and apply them to novel, large-scale datasets tracing the career outputs of artists, film directors, and scientists, allowing us to build high-dimensional representations of the artworks, films, and scientific publications they produce. By examining individuals' career trajectories within the underlying creative space, we find that across all three domains, individuals tend to explore diverse styles or topics before their hot streak, but become notably more focused in what they work on after the hot streak begins. Crucially, we find that hot streaks are associated with neither exploration nor…
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