Figure 1

Career examples and rescaled impact distributions in four creative domains. (a) The career trajectory of Stanley Kubrick. On the horizontal axis, we show the release year of his movies, while on the vertical axis we show the impact of each movie, captured by the number of ratings received from IMDb users. (b) The career of Michael Jackson. We show the release year of his songs and the song impact captured by the total play count on the music provider LastFM. (c) The career of Agatha Christie. We report her books’ publication dates and the book impact, captured by the number of ratings they received on Goodreads. (d) Publication history of Paul Erdős, mathematician and graph theorist, based on his record in the Web of Science database. The paper impact is measured by the number of total citations 10 years after publication. (e–h) The rescaled cumulative impact distribution \(P(p_{i,\alpha })\), where \(p_{i,\alpha }=S_{i,\alpha }/Q_{i}\) for (e) movies of directors, (f) tracks of musicians active in pop music, (g) books of authors, and (h) papers of mathematicians. The panels show that when we rescale the impact value of each product of an individual by his/her Q parameter, their distribution collapses onto roughly the same aggregated curve, marked by continuous colored lines. The distribution of 50 randomly chosen individuals is visualized by light grey lines