In a 2015 paper, “Does science advance one funeral at a time?” Pierre Azouley and colleagues show that when a star scientist dies, those in their network publish less, but those who had not previously collaborated with the dead scientist publish more. Dramatically, these new papers were, in this analysis, more likely to be highly cited. The authors suggest—plausibly enough—that the field, with the passing of an eminent scientist, becomes more hospitable to different ideas proposed by those who think differently than the deceased. In a subsequent publication of this paper, the same authors suggest that “the loss of a luminary provides an opportunity for fields to evolve in new directions that advance the frontier of knowledge.”
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