Abstract:

[Purpose/Significance] The impact attenuation of breakthrough scientific achievements significantly deviates from the "rapid decay" law described by the Price index, and their lifecycle far exceeds conventional literature. Understanding their long-term evolutionary characteristics is of great value for improving the scientific research evaluation system. This article focuses on the long-term (over 30 years) impact evolution of breakthrough achievements that cross the conventional aging cycle of 10 to 15 years. These achievements are in response to the national requirements for evaluating the innovation of scientific research talent., The goal is to construct an evolutionary, dynamic model of their citation trajectories and reveal the mechanisms underlying knowledge diffusion and maintenance. The study uses a typical case design with the goal of "theoretical generation" and providing an "analytical framework". It does not pursue statistical generalization based on large samples, but provides a transferable analytical paradigm and measurement tool for understanding the long-term impact of breakthrough achievements through in-depth analysis of a single extreme case. [Method/Process] Taking the basic literature group of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) by Paul C. Lauterbur and Peter Mansfield, Nobel laureates in Physiology or Medicine in 2003, as a typical case, based on citation data from the Web of Science core set, the retrieval time span was set from 1969 to 2024 to fully cover the entire lifecycle from theoretical proposal to long tail evolution. A total of 271 source literature and all cited publications were obtained, and a source citation matrix was constructed as the data base. By comprehensively utilizing tools such as SPSS, CiteSpace, Vosviewer, OpenRefine, Mythtype, and Python, a bimodal Gaussian superposition exponential decay model was used for nonlinear curve fitting and parameter estimation. The aging differences of different knowledge forms were measured through subject citation half-life analysis, and the boundary crosser index (BSI) was introduced to quantify the strength of cross-border cooperation. The co-occurrence analysis method was used to track the temporal evolution path of knowledge attributes. [Results/Conclusions] 1)The citation trajectory of breakthrough achievements presents an asymmetric evolution feature of "delayed awakening of bimodal oscillation long tail steady state", with the damping coefficient λ of the long tail period approaching 0; 2) The instrumental transition of knowledge attributes determines long-term stability: methodological tool literature has the longest half-life and is a key mechanism for achieving the long tail effect; 3) Cross border spillover relies on the efforts of "boundary crossers", with high BSI values corresponding to shorter bimodal intervals and steeper second peaks, accelerating the transformation of theory into technology. This concept resonates at the forefront of distant disciplines such as psychology. The long-term impact of breakthrough achievements is essentially a collaborative process of "knowledge instrumentalization" and "cross domain spillover". This article constructs a long-term impact identification framework (TLI) with a three-dimensional coupling of "time trajectory knowledge form spatial spillover". It suggests that, rather than focusing on short-term citation peaks, scientific research evaluation should identify the trajectory characteristics and cross-border potential of literature using methodological tools.

Key words: breakthrough achievements, long-term influence, citation trajectory, knowledge instrumentalization, interdisciplinary spillover, boundary crosser