image: This set of visualizations represents the career of a scientist as a line, where each bump represents the impact (number of citations) of a paper. The larger the bump, the bigger the impact. When looking at thousands of these lines we see that success is randomly distributed within careers -- the highest impact publication could be the first publication, could appear midcareer or could be a scientist's last publication. This random impact rule holds true for scientists who work alone, in groups, in different disciplines, in different decades, and for different lengths. view more
Credit: Image by Kim Albrecht, data image by Roberta Sinatra