5 ms·

I really enjoyed Simonton's work but was quite surprised by the equal-odds rule you mentioned. It doesn't seem to apply to scientists at the highest level e.g.

• gwern 14y ago
  I'm not sure about that. To some degree, you expect that Einstein's fame means that he would get an 'unfair' amount of credit for even his dull papers either because people give them too much credit ("it's Einstein, after all!") or because they get more attention than your ordinary paper which has no fans reading everything that author produces. But I think Einstein published quite a lot, actually, which would satisfy the equal-odds rule: I recall reading someone mentioning that only one paper of Einstein underwent peer review out of ~100 published, and now that I look, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_scientific_publications_by_Albert_Einstein http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_scientific_publications... is a very long page.