From consolidation to disruption: A novel way to measure the impact of scientists and identify laureates

•Introduced a set of new metrics for measuring the disruptive and consolidating impact of scientists, based on the citation network structure of publications.•Developed a dual measurement framework by combining the disruptive and consolidating impact of scientists, providing a more comprehensive measure of their overall impact.•Compared the performance of the proposed metrics against traditional and normalized disruption-based metrics, showing that they outperform benchmark methods in identifying laureates.•Disruptive impact can identify successful scientists from their counterparts, while the consolidating impact may be the influence foam of the total impact of a scientist.•The disruptive citation (DC) of a focal paper exhibits a comparatively greater resistance to manipulation through the deliberate reduction of reference count, as opposed to the CD-index metric. This study proposes a novel approach for evaluating the impact of scientists by introducing a new set of metrics and a dual measurement framework that combines the concepts of disruption and consolidation. Traditional metrics like total citation and h-index are limited in their ability to capture the full range of a scientist's influence, and therefore the Scientists' Disruptive Citation (SDC), Disruptive h-index (D h-index), and consolidating metrics are introduced to provide a more comprehensive evaluation of scientists' disruptive and consolidating influence. Using a dataset of 463,348 papers, 234,086 disambiguated scientists, and data on three important awards, including Nobel Prize, Wolf Prize, and Dirac Medal, in the field of Physics, this study demonstrates that the SDC and D h-index are superior to all benchmark metrics, including the conventional and normalized disruption-based measures, in terms of convergent validity. Second, this study analyzes the distribution of academic characteristics between award-winning and non-laureates, explores various metrics of scientists with high SDC and Scientists' Consolidating Citation (SCC), and finds that disruptive impact can identify successful scientists from their counterparts and serve as an early signal of successful scientists. Third, this study reveals that the disruptive citation proposed in this study is less susceptible to manipulation, making it a more reliable metric for assessing a scientist's or a single paper's disruptive impact than the CD-index. The results suggest that the SDC and D h-index are reliable metrics for measuring scie