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Nobel laureates are almost the same as us

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Data show that apart from their prize-winning work, the careers of Nobel laureates follow the same patterns as those of the majority of scientists.

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Fig. 1: Career patterns of Nobel laureates.

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Acknowledgements

The authors thank L. Liu, Y. Wang, Y. Ma, J. Love, B. Uzzi and all members of Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO) for invaluable comments and helpful suggestions. This work is supported by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research under award numbers FA9550-15-1-0162 and FA9550-17-1-0089, National Science Foundation grant SBE 1829344 and Northwestern University’s Data Science Initiative.

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D.W. and S.F. conceived the project; D. W. designed the experiments; J.L. and Y.Y. collected data and performed empirical analyses with help from S.F. and D.W.; all authors discussed and interpreted results; D.W., J.L. and Y.Y. wrote the manuscript; and all authors edited the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Dashun Wang.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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Li, J., Yin, Y., Fortunato, S. et al. Nobel laureates are almost the same as us. Nat Rev Phys 1, 301–303 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s42254-019-0057-z

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