See further upon the giants: Quantifying intellectual lineage in science

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new method to identify the 'giant' prior work behind scientific discoveries, revealing that a few key papers significantly influence future impact and progress across disciplines.

Contribution

It develops a discipline-independent approach to quantify the influence of prior works, providing insights into the role of giants in scientific advancement.

Findings

95% of papers build on giants across disciplines

Giant index predicts future impact and awards

Disruptive and developmental giants both contribute to progress

Abstract

Newton's centuries-old wisdom of standing on the shoulders of giants raises a crucial yet underexplored question: Out of all the prior works cited by a discovery, which one is its giant? Here, we develop a novel, discipline-independent method to identify the giant for any individual paper, allowing us to systematically examine the role and characteristics of giants in science. We find that across disciplines, about 95% of papers stand on the shoulders of giants, yet the weight of scientific progress rests on relatively few shoulders. Defining a new measure of giant index, we find that, while papers with high citations are more likely to be giants, for papers with the same citations, their giant index sharply predicts a paper's future impact and prize-winning probabilities. Giants tend to originate from both small and large teams, being either highly disruptive or highly developmental. And papers that did not have a giant but later became a giant tend to be home-run papers that are highly disruptive to science. Given the crucial importance of citation-based measures in science, the developed concept of giants may offer a useful new dimension in assessing scientific impact that goes beyond sheer citation counts.