Quantifying revolutionary discoveries: Evidence from Nobel prize-winning papers

Numerous metrics have been developed to identify revolutionary science which is crucial for advancing science. However, these metrics have rarely successfully identified revolutionary dis-coveries. We propose a two-dimension metric to quantify revolutionary discoveries by combining the consolidation-or-destabilization (CD) index with the citation count. To verify the validity of the metric, we utilize multivariate linear regression to investigate the differences in the CD indices and citations between 164 Nobel prize-winning papers from 1976 to 2016 (i.e., revolu-tionary science) and 9,034 counterparts that are similar to the Nobel prize-winning papers in terms of bibliographic information. We find that our proposed metric successfully shows a sig-nificant and distinct difference between the Nobel prize-winning papers and their counterparts in that the former receive around 880 more citations and 0.07 higher CD indices than the latter. The reliability of our proposed measure is robust.

Automated summary

To quantify revolutionary discoveries, a two-dimensional metric combining the consolidation-or-destabilization (CD) index with citation count is proposed. Through multivariate linear regression analysis on 164 Nobel prize-winning papers and 9,034 counterparts, significant differences were found between the two groups, with the Nobel prize-winning papers receiving approximately 880 more citations and having an average CD index 0.07 higher than the counterparts. The proposed metric proves to be reliable in measuring revolutionary science.