In the last two decades, scholars have designed various types of bibliographic related indicators to identify breakthrough-class academic achievements. In this study, we take a further step to look at properties of the promising disruptive index, thus deepening our understanding of this index and further facilitating its wise use in bibliometrics. Using publication records for Nobel laureates between 1900 and 2016, we calculate the DI of Nobel Prize-winning articles and its benchmark articles in each year and use the median DI to denote the central tendency in each year, and compare results between Medicine, Chemistry, and Physics. We find that conclusions based on DI depend on the length of their citation time window, and different citation time windows may cause different, even controversial, results. Also, discipline and time play a role on the length of citation window when using DI to measure the innovativeness of a scientific work. Finally, not all articles with DI equals to 1 were the breakthrough-class achievements. In other words, the DI stands up theoretically, but we should not neglect that the DI was only shaped by the number of citing articles and times the references have been cited, these data may vary from database to database.

中文翻译：

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相同数据可能带来冲突结果：谨慎使用破坏性索引

近二十年来，学者们设计了各种类型的书目相关指标来识别突破性的学术成果。在这项研究中，我们进一步研究了有前途的破坏性指数的特性，从而加深了我们对该指数的理解，并进一步促进了它在文献计量学中的明智使用。使用1900年至2016年诺贝尔奖获得者的发表记录，我们计算了每年诺贝尔奖获奖文章及其基准文章的DI，并用DI中位数表示每年的集中趋势，并比较医学、化学、和物理。我们发现基于 DI 的结论取决于其引用时间窗口的长度，不同的引用时间窗口可能会导致不同的甚至有争议的结果。还，在使用 DI 衡量科学工作的创新性时，学科和时间对引用窗口的长度起着重要作用。最后，并非所有DI等于1的文章都是突破级成果。换句话说，DI在理论上是站得住脚的，但我们不应忽视DI仅由被引文章的数量和参考文献被引用的次数决定，这些数据可能因数据库而异。