Knowledge recency to the birth of Nobel Prize-winning articles: Gender, career stage, and country

Scientific ideas seldom come entirely from nothing; they often originate from existing knowledge. In this study, we aim to identify the relationship between the knowledge recency and Nobel Prize-winning articles (NPs) from the perspectives of gender, career stage, and country of the originators. Scientific literatures published by Nobel laureates in the Physiology or Medicine field are treated as NPs, and the age of references cited in those literatures are considered a measurement of knowledge recency. Results show that most NPs in this field have been focused on literature with a low mean and median recency, and over half of these works have cited equal to or more than 68 % of recent literature published within five years. Contrary to traditional wisdom, the greatest discoveries made after 1980 have shown an increasing favor to older literature. We also find that there has been no gender gap for the recency of NPs; however, career stage has been an important factor influencing knowledge recency, which means older researchers tend to cite more earlier articles than others.