The boundary-spanning mechanisms of Nobel Prize winning papers

Yakub Sebastian; Chaomei Chen

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0254744

Peer Review History

Original SubmissionMarch 10, 2021
10 May 2021 Decision Letter - Yiming Tang, Editor PONE-D-21-07994 The boundary-spanning mechanisms of Nobel Prize winning papers PLOS ONE Dear Dr. Sebastian, Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS ONE’s publication criteria as it currently stands. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process. Please submit your revised manuscript by Jun 24 2021 11:59PM. If you will need more time than this to complete your revisions, please reply to this message or contact the journal office at plosone@plos.org. When you're ready to submit your revision, log on to https://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/ and select the 'Submissions Needing Revision' folder to locate your manuscript file. 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The PLOS ONE style templates can be found at https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/file?id=wjVg/PLOSOne_formatting_sample_main_body.pdf and https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/file?id=ba62/PLOSOne_formatting_sample_title_authors_affiliations.pdf 2. Please review your reference list to ensure that it is complete and correct. If you have cited papers that have been retracted, please include the rationale for doing so in the manuscript text, or remove these references and replace them with relevant current references. Any changes to the reference list should be mentioned in the rebuttal letter that accompanies your revised manuscript. If you need to cite a retracted article, indicate the article’s retracted status in the References list and also include a citation and full reference for the retraction notice. [Note: HTML markup is below. Please do not edit.] Reviewers' comments: Reviewer's Responses to Questions Comments to the Author 1. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions? The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented. Reviewer #1: Yes ******** 2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? Reviewer #1: Yes ****** 3. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available? The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified. Reviewer #1: No ****** 4. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English? PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here. Reviewer #1: Yes ****** 5. Review Comments to the Author Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters) Reviewer #1: I enjoyed reading manuscript PONE-D-21-07994 on boundary-spanning mechanisms of Nobel Prize winning papers. Here by looking at the structural impact on co-citation networks, this paper tackles an important question: what are the signals (based on references) that predict breakthrough (Nobel Prize winning) papers? Overall this paper is technically sound and clearly written, and should be accepted after considering the following comments. 1. My only major comment is about the framing of its contribution. There have been many citation-based predictors related to Nobel Prize (on a related note, the authors may also want to cite “Network Signatures of Success: Emulating Expert and Crowd Assessment in Science, Art, and Technology”). The current version distinguishes from itself from these works in timing, i.e. “leading indicators of breakthrough that can be computed at the time of a paper’s publication”. Yet in my opinion, the difference between the two approaches may be even more fundamental – the new analysis presented here is purely based the stock of knowledge, rather than scientific impact or recognition received from future works. Maybe the authors can come up with better words/phrases, but I would recommend thinking a little bit more around the conceptualization. 2. The readers may not be extremely familiar with SVA, so it might be better to provide more explanations for technical terms. For one, the word “cluster” can be ambiguous in network literature – some use it to indicate connected components while others use it to any communities in community detection tasks (which seem to be the case here) 3. I wonder how scalable this approach would be. For example, if we want to run an analysis over all Nobel-prize winning papers, what is the rough estimation of manual efforts one should spend? To be clear I’m not questioning the practical value of this method, but adding some more comments around this would be extremely helpful for future studies (either a highlight of its high scalability or a sentence in limitation should be good). 4. For discussion of future works, a promising direction would be engaging more advanced network analysis tools (e.g. high-order indexes as well as network embeddings) to better understand the predictability of network-based approaches. Again I’m not asking for additional analyses here, but having some discussions around this should make the paper more relevant for a broader range of audience. ****** 6. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files. If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public. Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review?** For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy. Reviewer #1: No [NOTE: If reviewer comments were submitted as an attachment file, they will be attached to this email and accessible via the submission site. Please log into your account, locate the manuscript record, and check for the action link "View Attachments". If this link does not appear, there are no attachment files.] While revising your submission, please upload your figure files to the Preflight Analysis and Conversion Engine (PACE) digital diagnostic tool, https://pacev2.apexcovantage.com/. PACE helps ensure that figures meet PLOS requirements. To use PACE, you must first register as a user. Registration is free. Then, login and navigate to the UPLOAD tab, where you will find detailed instructions on how to use the tool. If you encounter any issues or have any questions when using PACE, please email PLOS at figures@plos.org. Please note that Supporting Information files do not need this step. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0254744.r001
Revision 1
22 May 2021 Author Response Reviewer’s open comments: 1. My only major comment is about the framing of its contribution. There have been many citation-based predictors related to Nobel Prize (on a related note, the authors may also want to cite “Network Signatures of Success: Emulating Expert and Crowd Assessment in Science, Art, and Technology”). The current version distinguishes from itself from these works in timing, i.e. “leading indicators of breakthrough that can be computed at the time of a paper’s publication”. Yet in my opinion, the difference between the two approaches may be even more fundamental – the new analysis presented here is purely based the stock of knowledge, rather than scientific impact or recognition received from future works. Maybe the authors can come up with better words/phrases, but I would recommend thinking a little bit more around the conceptualization. Our response: We thank the reviewer for pointing us to the related work Zakhlebin, I. and Horvát, E.Á., 2017, November. Network signatures of success: Emulating expert and crowd assessment in science, art, and technology. In International Conference on Complex Networks and their Applications (pp. 437-449). Springer. Correspondingly, we added a review of this work in section “Network properties and structural variations”, lines 138 – 146 with a new reference [41] corresponding to it. As suggested by the reviewer, we further elaborated the conceptualization and impacts of our research contributions on lines 190 – 202 and 696 – 734. We also added new references [46], [47] and [69] in support of the arguments. 2. The readers may not be extremely familiar with SVA, so it might be better to provide more explanations for technical terms. For one, the word “cluster” can be ambiguous in network literature – some use it to indicate connected components while others use it to any communities in community detection tasks (which seem to be the case here). Our response: We added two new paragraphs on lines 290 – 306 that provide detailed explanations of two key terminologies underlying SVA: co-citation network and clusters. As correctly observed by the reviewer, the precise meaning of the term `cluster’ in this manuscript carries a similar meaning to `community’ in community detection. We also included a new reference [57], which provides the interested novice readers with extra insights into the theory and intuition behind co-citation networks. 3. I wonder how scalable this approach would be. For example, if we want to run an analysis over all Nobel-prize winning papers, what is the rough estimation of manual efforts one should spend? To be clear I’m not questioning the practical value of this method, but adding some more comments around this would be extremely helpful for future studies (either a highlight of its high scalability or a sentence in limitation should be good). Our response: We added 1 paragraph under ‘Limitation’ section on lines 846 – 857 on the scalability of our approach and current limitations. 4. For discussion of future works, a promising direction would be engaging more advanced network analysis tools (e.g. high-order indexes as well as network embeddings) to better understand the predictability of network-based approaches. Again I’m not asking for additional analyses here, but having some discussions around this should make the paper more relevant for a broader range of audience. Our response: We added 1 paragraph under ‘Limitation’ section on lines 858 – 862, suggesting that recent network analysis paradigms (such as network embedding, heterogeneous network representation, and knowledge graph learning) may provide possible alternatives for measuring boundary-spanning qualities of Nobel Prize winning papers. New references [71 – 73] were added in support of these. Dataset availability: [3.] Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available? The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified. Reviewer #1: No Our response: The datasets we generated and analyzed for this study are freely accessible from Figshare at https://figshare.com/s/5e0e279c51f6de9df947 . Further information about the dataset provision and access is provided in the S1 file (Supporting Information). Acknowledgment: We added a thank you note to the anonymous reviewer. Attachments Attachment Submitted filename: Response to Reviewers.pdf https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0254744.r002
6 Jul 2021 Decision Letter - Yiming Tang, Editor The boundary-spanning mechanisms of Nobel Prize winning papers PONE-D-21-07994R1 Dear Dr. Sebastian, We’re pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been judged scientifically suitable for publication and will be formally accepted for publication once it meets all outstanding technical requirements. Within one week, you’ll receive an e-mail detailing the required amendments. When these have been addressed, you’ll receive a formal acceptance letter and your manuscript will be scheduled for publication. An invoice for payment will follow shortly after the formal acceptance. To ensure an efficient process, please log into Editorial Manager at http://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/, click the 'Update My Information' link at the top of the page, and double check that your user information is up-to-date. If you have any billing related questions, please contact our Author Billing department directly at authorbilling@plos.org. If your institution or institutions have a press office, please notify them about your upcoming paper to help maximize its impact. If they’ll be preparing press materials, please inform our press team as soon as possible -- no later than 48 hours after receiving the formal acceptance. Your manuscript will remain under strict press embargo until 2 pm Eastern Time on the date of publication. For more information, please contact onepress@plos.org. Kind regards, Yiming Tang, Ph.D. Academic Editor PLOS ONE Additional Editor Comments (optional): Reviewers' comments: Reviewer's Responses to Questions Comments to the Author 1. If the authors have adequately addressed your comments raised in a previous round of review and you feel that this manuscript is now acceptable for publication, you may indicate that here to bypass the “Comments to the Author” section, enter your conflict of interest statement in the “Confidential to Editor” section, and submit your "Accept" recommendation. Reviewer #1: All comments have been addressed Reviewer #2: All comments have been addressed ******** 2. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions? The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented. Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: Yes ****** 3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: Yes ****** 4. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available? The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified. Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: Yes ****** 5. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English? PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here. Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: Yes ****** 6. Review Comments to the Author Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters) Reviewer #1: I appreciate the authors' efforts in revising this paper and would like to recommend publication of its current version. Thanks for this interesting paper. Reviewer #2: The paper is technically sound and the method is good. More detailed explanations of previous works may be included. ****** 7. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files. If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public. Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review?** For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy. Reviewer #1: No Reviewer #2: No https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0254744.r003
Formally Accepted
21 Jul 2021 Acceptance Letter - Yiming Tang, Editor PONE-D-21-07994R1 The boundary-spanning mechanisms of Nobel Prize winning papers Dear Dr. Sebastian: I'm pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been deemed suitable for publication in PLOS ONE. Congratulations! Your manuscript is now with our production department. If your institution or institutions have a press office, please let them know about your upcoming paper now to help maximize its impact. If they'll be preparing press materials, please inform our press team within the next 48 hours. Your manuscript will remain under strict press embargo until 2 pm Eastern Time on the date of publication. For more information please contact onepress@plos.org. If we can help with anything else, please email us at plosone@plos.org. Thank you for submitting your work to PLOS ONE and supporting open access. Kind regards, PLOS ONE Editorial Office Staff on behalf of Professor Yiming Tang Academic Editor PLOS ONE https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0254744.r004

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