Figure 2

Impact patterns in collaborative careers. (A) The distribution of the timing of the highest-impact paper \(P(t^{*})\) for collaborative careers (circles) and their shuffled versions (crosses). The trend is almost identical after the shuffling. The inset shows the cumulative distribution of the relative position \(P(\leq N^{*}/N)\), indicating that the highest-impact paper is distributed randomly in a collaborative career. Thus, the decay in \(P(t^{*})\) can be explained by the declining productivity over time. (B) \(\langle \log{ (\tilde{c}_{10} )} \rangle \) as a function of N. Each point in the scatter plot corresponds to a pair of scientists, and the gray circles represent the log-binned mean of the data. The prediction of the Q-model (orange) agrees well with the data, in contrast to the R-model (blue). (C) The collapse of the cumulative distributions \(P(\geq \tilde{c}_{10}/Q)\). Each gray curve corresponds to a pair, and the black curve represents the universal distribution \(P(p)\)