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.

科学思想很少完全来自虚无。它们通常来自现有知识。在本研究中，我们旨在从性别，职业阶段和创建者所在国家的角度来确定知识新近度与诺贝尔奖获得者文章之间的关系。诺贝尔奖获得者在生理学或医学领域发表的科学文献被视为NP，而这些文献中引用的参考文献的年龄也被视为衡量知识新近度的标准。结果表明，该领域中的大多数NP都集中在平均数和中位数新近度较低的文献上，其中超过一半的文献引用了等于或超过五年内最新文献的68％。与传统观点相反，1980年后的最伟大发现显示出对古老文学的日益青睐。我们还发现，NP的新近度没有性别差距；但是，职业阶段是影响知识新近度的重要因素，这意味着年长的研究人员倾向于引用比其他人更早的文章。