Illustration of the boosting effect.

<p>Typical citation trajectories of papers, here for Nobel Prize Laureate John Bennett Fenn, who received the award in chemistry in 2002 for the development of the electrospray ionization technique used to analyze biological macromolecules. The original article, entitled <i>Electrospray ionization for mass spectrometry of large biomolecules</i>, coauthored by M. Mann, C. K. Meng, S. F. Wong and C. M. Whitehouse, was published in <i>Science</i> in 1989 and is the most cited work of Fenn, with currently over 3,000 citations. The diagram reports the growth in time of the total number of citations received by this landmark paper (blue solid line) and by six older papers. The diagram indicates that the number of citations of the landmark paper has literally exploded in the first years after its appearance. However, after its publication in 1989, a number of other papers also enjoyed a much higher citation rate. Thus, a sizeable part of previous scientific work has reached a big impact after the publication of the landmark paper. We found that the occurrence of this boosting effect is characteristic for successful scientific careers.