Zürich, Switzerland. Given that attention is a scarce resource in today's society, and if attention is paid only to people who are already at the top, how are scientific revolutions possible?

This is particularly important since success at innovation leads to the rich-get-richer effect and a tendency of many successful people to be content with their celebrity and material rewards.


Publication of a new report investigating the careers of Nobel Prize winners provides insight into this phenomenon. Dirk Helbing is a professor at ETH Zurich, and Bernardo Huberman, the Director of the Social Computing Lab at HP. They note "We live in a world where information overload is normal. Attention is precious. The money goes where the attention is. And often people are willing to trade money for the attention of others."

Attention Economics

Citation: Success

In everyday life, understanding the laws of attention economics is a prerequisite of material success.

As a study of publications by Nobel Prize laureates shows, the same generally is true for scientific achievements.

Success in science is measured in citations. That is, the more citations by others a researcher collects in important journals, the more praise can follow.

In a sense, the accumulation of citations is for scientists what bonuses are for bankers, or, likewise, what applause means for artists.When economists study the attention of humans as a scarce commodity, they solve various information management problems by applying economic theory. Commonly, the concept of attention is defined as "focused mental engagement on a particular item of information", used as the decision point for action.

Herbert Simon noted the information-rich world that consumes the attention of recipients from the overabundance of sources that compete for that attention to the detriment of other alternatives. He argued that designers built of information systems that were very good at providing increasing quantities of information to people, but neglected to filter out what was unneeded or unwanted from the end product.

This phenomenon at has, over time, entered common conversation as information overload, which has been popularized as economic in nature (i.e., resource wasting).

Boosting Nobel Prizes

Information overload is known in science as well. The number of research articles exceeds by far the total that a researcher can read in a single life. Additionally, scientific fields of research are usually dominated by a few outstanding scientists that attract most of the attention. In this almost hostile environment, how can unknown researchers bring about a paradigm shift?

How are groundbreaking discoveries feasible at all? A recent publication by the teams of Dirk Helbing of ETH Zurich and Santo Fortunato of the Institute for Scientific Interchange (ISI) in Turin throws light on this matter. In their paper, the researchers investigate several million citations in the scientific area, references to Nobel Prize laureates in particular.

"Remarkably, innovations are able to overcome the rich-gets-richer dynamics," Helbing says. The explanation of this phenomenon is based on a new key parameter, the so-called boost factor. "Sometimes, a paper gets cited overwhelmingly often and thus overcomes the rich-gets-richer effect. We then see citation cascades," Helbing says.

These papers are called landmark papers. The boost factor represents a powerful instrument in accurately describing the careers of researchers. Its peaks precisely indicate the landmark papers.

New Talents

Citations have become a widespread method to measure scientific excellence. For example, they are frequently used in academic recruitment procedures. Furthermore, they play an important role in university rankings and for the distribution of funds among scholars and scientific institutions.

However, the boost factor proposed by the teams of Helbing and Fortunato goes beyond the indices that are commonly used in its sensitivity to identifying landmark events: The sharp peaks allow one to identify scientific breakthroughs and talents much earlier than through classical citation analysis. The authors propose that the boost factor could be used together with other measures to evaluate the performance of scientists.

Interestingly, the boost factor also shows that, when a groundbreaking paper receives abundant attention, the scientist's body of work overall enjoys a greater impact. A specific paper thus influences even the success of publications in the past. The benefitting pieces of work do not even have to be from the same area of research.

"Similar feedback effects are likely to affect the influence of a politician, or the price of a product," suggests Helbing. "Otherwise brands would not be so important."

A Self-organized Critical System?

Interestingly, the statistical distribution of the peaks of the boost factor looks like a power law. This suggests that the boosts may reach any possible size. "In fact, we observe everything, from small cascades that reflect quasi-continuous scientific progress all the way up to scientific revolutions, which change our perception of the world fundamentally," says Helbing. Nobel Prize winners, for instance, usually have a significantly larger boost compared to other scientists.

This power law behavior indicates that science undergoes phase transitions, where sudden systemic shifts occur. For example, new scientific concepts such as Quantum Mechanics or Einstein's Theory of Relativity may be understood as paradigm shifts. Furthermore, the scientific system seems to drive itself toward the tipping point, where citation avalanches occur on all scales. "It's only for this reason that innovations sometimes have a chance to overcome established paradigms," concludes Helbing.

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