Understanding how institutional changes within academia may affect the overall potential of science requires a better quantitative representation of how careers evolve over time. Since knowledge spillovers, cumulative advantage, competition, and collaboration are distinctive features of the...

Statistical analysis is a major aspect of baseball, from player averages to historical benchmarks and records. Much of baseball fanfare is based around players exceeding the norm, some in a single game and others over a long career. Career statistics serve as a metric for classifying players and...

Recent “science of science” research shows common regularities in the publication patterns of scientific papers across time and discipline. Here, we analyze the complete publication careers of 300 scientists and find remarkable regularity in the functional form of the rank-citation profile...

The Matthew effect refers to the adage written some two-thousand years ago in the Gospel of St. Matthew: “For to all those who have, more will be given.” Even two millennia later, this idiom is used by sociologists to qualitatively describe the dynamics of individual progress and the...

Complex systems can be characterized by classes of equivalency of their elements defined according to system specific rules. We propose a generalized preferential attachment model to describe the class size distribution. The model postulates preferential growth of the existing classes and the...

The size distribution of business firms is explained using number and size of firms' constituent components. It is a lognormal distribution multiplied by a stretching factor which can lead to a Pareto upper tail. This result is confirmed empirically

Society’s increasing interactions with technology are creating extensive "digital traces" of our collective human behavior. These new data sources are fueling the rapid development of the new field of computational social science. To investigate user attention to the Hurricane Sandy disaster...

We introduce a model of proportional growth to explain the distribution Pg(g) of business-firm growth rates. The model predicts that Pg(g) is exponential in the central part and depicts an asymptotic power-law behavior in the tails with an exponent z=3. Because of data limitations, previous...

Reputation is an important social construct in science, which enables informed quality assessments of both publications and careers of scientists in the absence of complete systemic information. However, the relation between reputation and career growth of an individual remains poorly...