Abstract Purpose This article aims to determine the percentage of “Sparking” articles among the work of this year’s Nobel Prize winners in medicine, physics, and chemistry. Design/methodology/approach We focus on under-cited influential research among the key publications as mentioned by the Nobel Prize Committee for the 2020 Noble Prize laureates. Specifically, we extracted data from the Web of Science, and calculated the Sparking Indices using the formulas as proposed by Hu and Rousseau in 2016 and 2017. In addition, we identified another type of igniting articles based on the notion in 2017. Findings In the fields of medicine and physics, the proportions of articles with sparking characteristics share 78.571% and 68.75% respectively, yet, in chemistry 90% articles characterized by “igniting”. Moreover, the two types of articles share more than 93% in the work of the Nobel Prize included in this study. Research limitations Our research did not cover the impact of topic, socio-political, and author’s reputation on the Sparking Indices. Practical implications Our study shows that the Sparking Indices truly reflect influence of the best research work, so it can be used to detect under-cited influential articles, as well as identifying fundamental work. Originality/value Our findings suggest that the Sparking Indices have good applicability for research evaluation.

中文翻译：

---

2020年诺贝尔奖获得者的“火花”和“点燃”关键出版物

摘要 目的 本文旨在确定今年诺贝尔医学奖、物理学奖和化学奖获得者作品中“火花”文章的百分比。设计/方法/途径 我们专注于诺贝尔奖委员会为 2020 年诺贝尔奖获得者提到的关键出版物中被引用不足的有影响力的研究。具体而言，我们从 Web of Science 中提取数据，并使用 Hu 和 Rousseau 在 2016 年和 2017 年提出的公式计算了 Sparking Indices。此外，我们在 2017 年根据该概念确定了另一种类型的点燃文章。医学和物理学领域，具有火花特征的文章比例分别为78.571%和68.75%，而在化学中，90%的文章具有“点燃”特征。此外，这两类文章在本研究纳入的诺贝尔奖工作中的占比均超过 93%。研究限制 我们的研究没有涵盖主题、社会政治和作者声誉对引发指数的影响。实际意义 我们的研究表明，Sparking Indices 真正反映了最佳研究工作的影响，因此它可以用来检测被引用不足的有影响力的文章，以及识别基础工作。