In this artícle a quantitative study is reported on the resistance that scientists may encounter when they do innovative work or when they attempt to publish articles that later become highly cited. A set of 205 commentaries by authors of some of the most-cited papers of all times have been examined in order to identify those articles whose authors encountered difficulty in getting his or her w...

We present scientometric results about worldwide centers of excellence in psychology. Based on Web of Science data, scientific excellence can be identified for cities from where highly-cited papers originate. Data refer to all psychology articles published in 2007 which are documented in the Social Science Citation Index and to their citation frequencies from 2007 to May 2011. 218 cities are vi...

Research which explores unchartered waters has a high potential for major impact but also carries a higher uncertainty of having impact. Such explorative research is often described as taking a novel approach. This study examines the complex relationship between pursuing a novel approach and impact. Viewing scientific research as a combinatorial process, we measure novelty in science by examini...

This study aims to provide an overview of the citation rate of arXiv.org since its launch in August 1991, based on the Scopus citation database. The total number of citations to arXiv in Scopus in the 26 year period was 135,782 of which the highest number of citations was 23,288 in 2016. It is also shown that arXiv-deposited papers are highly cited by physics and astronomy, mathematics, compute...

The misuse of journal impact factor in hiring and promotion decisions is a growing concern. This article is one in a series of invited commentaries in which authors discuss this problem and consider alternative measures of an individual's impact. The number of citations is the most commonly used metric for quantifying the importance of scientific publications. However , we all have anecdotal ex...