Dipartimento di Ingegneria informatica, automatica e gestionale

The analysis of the success in science has been a subject of interest and study for a long time. “Success breeds success” or the so called Mattheu effect, as it was named by Merton (1973), was used to explain the cumulative effects observed in the sociology of science, analysing nobel prize winners. But what are the determinants of scientific success? What makes a tiny proportion of scholars successful? Why a few scholars rise far above the rest, or using the terms of de Solla Price (1963, p. 59), why there are a “few giants and a mass of pygmies” and “neither man nor nature pushes us toward egalitarian uniformity