Developing measures and models that offer actionable information towards a quantitative evaluation and prediction of scientific success — from individual publications to entire research institutions.
Open-access PDF · Published in Science, Vol. 354, Issue 6312 (2016)
About the project
Despite the extraordinary impact science has on our life, little is known about the patterns that lead to scientific excellence. Is the success of a particular work predictable? Can future individual performance be predicted? Are scientific discoveries more likely in certain countries and/or institutions?
By combining the tools of statistical physics and information science, we aim to uncover the predictability and the limits of predictability of scientific success. Our focus is on scientific performance captured at increasing levels of complexity: individual publications, scientists' careers, and research institutions. The final goal of our research is to provide theory and tools of potential utility to policy making, from funding decisions to discovering scientific talent.
New publication in Science
Read the paper that introduces the Q-model for predicting a scientist's most impactful work, or go straight to the PDF.
Download PDFWho's involved
Researchers from the Center for Complex Network Research (CCNR) and the MOBS Lab collaborating on this work.
László Barabási
Director, CCNR
Yifang Ma
Researcher, CCNR
Roberta Sinatra
Researcher, CCNR
Michael Szell
Researcher, CCNR
Alex Vespignani
Director, MOBS Lab
Matteo Chinazzi
Researcher, MOBS Lab
Junming Huang
Researcher, CCNR
Yasamin Khorramzadeh
Researcher, CCNR
Kaiyuan Sun
Researcher, MOBS Lab
Publications
Peer-reviewed work from the project, spanning individual impact, institutional funding, and the physics of citation dynamics.
Research category: Individual scientific impact
Science, Vol. 354, Issue 6312 (2016) · DOI: 10.1126/science.aaf5239
Featured in: New York Times, Science News, Nature News, The Scientist, Wired, Chronicle of Higher Education, Scientific American, Forbes. View the full list of press coverage here.
Research category: Research funding
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 112(48), 14749–14750 (2015) · DOI: 10.1038/nphys3494
Research category: Citation dynamics
Nature Physics, 11, 791 (2015) · DOI: 10.1038/nphys3494
Talks & slides
Roberta Sinatra, Alessandro Vespignani, Albert-László Barabási