Table 1.
Number of authors with precocious and ultra-precocious citation impact.
Table 2.
Characteristics of ultra-precocious, other precocious, and all top-cited authors (based on top-cited authors’ list from citation data until end of 2023).
Fig 1.
Signal indicators in 59 authors with ultra-precocious citation impact among top-cited scientists based on citation counts to end of 2023.
For definitions of the 8 indicators, see Methods. Data are from Scopus and raw data can be found in https://elsevier.digitalcommonsdata.com/datasets/btchxktzyw/7 for country, subfield, and all citation metrics, and https://elsevier.digitalcommonsdata.com/datasets/kmyvjk3xmd/2 for extreme publishing behavior. Compared with the 66 authors listed in https://elsevier.digitalcommonsdata.com/datasets/btchxktzyw/7, the figure does not include 5 journalists/columnists and 2 authors from Italy and Singapore who do not really have ultra-precocious citation impact, but represent data artefacts because Scopus split their earlier publications in a separate author file. Listing of the 59 authors here is alphabetical with one line per author. For the less developed country column, a gray color means that in the Scopus data freeze of August 1, 2024, the single author affiliation selected by Scopus for that author was from a developed country, but inspection of the full publication record of that author showed also affiliation(s) of that author with institutions in less developed countries.
Fig 2.
Proportion of each of the 8 signal indicators in 59 authors with ultra-precocious citation impact versus in all top-cited authors.
Data are from Scopus and raw data can be found in https://elsevier.digitalcommonsdata.com/datasets/btchxktzyw/7 for country, subfield, and all citation metrics, and https://elsevier.digitalcommonsdata.com/datasets/kmyvjk3xmd/2 for extreme publishing behavior. Same selection applies as in Fig 1 for the 59 authors.
Fig 3.
Signal indicators in 17 authors with ultra-precocious citation impact among top-cited scientists based on citation counts to end of 2017, 2018, 2019, or 2020 who had retractions as of October 8, 2024 in the Retraction Watch Database (see Methods for eligible retractions).
For definitions of the 8 indicators, see Methods. Values are as of the end of the year for which they first appeared in a top-cited list. Data are from Scopus and raw data can be found in https://elsevier.digitalcommonsdata.com/datasets/btchxktzyw for country, subfield, and all citation metrics, https://elsevier.digitalcommonsdata.com/datasets/kmyvjk3xmd/2 for extreme publishing behavior. Listing of the 17 authors here is alphabetical with one line per author. For the less developed country column, a gray color means that in the Scopus data freeze of August 1, 2024, the single author affiliation selected by Scopus for that author was from a developed country, but inspection of the full publication record of that author showed also affiliation(s) of that author with institutions in less developed countries.