Fig. 6: The landscape of estimated significance of the discovery.
From: Nobel Turing Challenge: creating the engine for scientific discovery
a The landscape is monotonic, and b the landscape is non-monotonic. A simplified illustration on why there are cases that research outcomes not immediately recognized to be significant lead to a major discovery. “Estimated significance of discoveries” is used only as a conceptual index. There is no rigid method to estimate the significance of the discovery. The numbers of citations and their temporal changes can be an interesting index, but it may be biased toward short-term popularity unless the time horizon is set appropriately.
