Colloquium: What Makes a Paper Seminal? Evidence from 80 Years of Economic Research

ABSTRACT: We study what makes an economics paper seminal, using 29,823 articles published in a Top-5 economics journal between 1940 and 2020. Seminal papers are in the Top-1% of within-year citations 16-20 years after publication and continue to accumulatecitations, while citations to early hit papers peak 1-5 years after publication. Author prolificness strongly predicts seminality whereas seniority does not. Co-author network centralities do not predict seminality, although they predict papers' broader influence. Conditional on being Top-5 publication, affiliation rank is not a reliable predictor of seminality and is weakly favorable to lower-ranked affiliations. Combinatorial novelty is insignificant or negatively correlated with seminality, while semantic novelty of abstracts is uninformative. Figures correlate with seminality, whereas tables mainly predict broad influence in the "empirical era." Authors with one additional seminal paper are 1.76 pp more likely to eventually become Nobel laureates.