Landmark Papers Boost Citations of Authors' Existing Papers

In an article titled "How Citation Boosts Promote Scientific Paradigm Shifts and Nobel Prizes", Amin Mazloumian et al. analyse the citation records of 124 Nobel Prize winners of the last two decades. They find that following the publication of a landmark highly cited paper, the existing papers of these authors receive increased citations. This effect was stronger for the Nobelists than for a randomly chosen sample of published scientists. Of course, this is an example of Robert Merton's Matthew Effect. Here highly cited authors are more likely to be cited as support raising their citation counts further.