We examine the tension between academic impact - the volume of citations received by publications - and scientific disruption. Intuitively, one would expect disruptive scientific work to be rewarded by high volumes of citations and, symmetrically, impactful work to also be disruptive. A number of recent studies have instead shown that such intuition is often at odds with reality. In this paper, we break down the relationship between impact and disruption with a detailed correlation analysis in two large data sets of publications in Computer Science and Physics. We find that highly disruptive papers tend to be cited at higher rates than average. Contrastingly, the opposite is not true, as we do not find highly impactful papers to be particularly disruptive. Notably, these results qualitatively hold even within individual scientific careers, as we find that - on average - an author's most disruptive work tends to be well cited, whereas their most cited work does not tend to be disruptive. We discuss the implications of our findings in the context of academic evaluation systems, and show how they can contribute to reconcile seemingly contradictory results in the literature.

翻译：我们探讨了学术影响力（即出版物获得的引用数量）与科学颠覆性之间的张力。直觉上，人们会预期颠覆性科学成果能获得大量引用，反之亦然，高影响力成果也应具有颠覆性。然而，近期多项研究表明，这种直觉往往与现实相悖。本文通过详细的相关性分析，基于计算机科学和物理学领域的两大数据集，解析了影响力与颠覆性的关系。研究发现：高颠覆性论文的引用率通常高于平均水平；但反之不成立——高影响力论文并不具有显著颠覆性。值得注意的是，该结论在个体学术生涯层面仍定性成立——平均而言，作者最具颠覆性的成果往往引用良好，而引用最高的成果却并非颠覆性。我们讨论了这些发现对学术评价体系的意义，并阐明其如何帮助调和文献中看似矛盾的结论。