The Empirical Study Of Newton Hypothesis Or Ortega Hypothesis

Newton said that "if I have been able to see further, it was only because I stood on the shoulders of giants". While Ortega thought that the public will become the mainstream of the society with the rise of the public. This leads to a question whether the public or the academic elites constitute the dominant force of the scientific research, which guides the development of the subjects in academic research area. The academic papers are the major carrier to output the research achievement and to communicate the knowledge and information, while the cited of the academic papers is the major way to identify and accept the scientific research achievements. So the study to find the proportional distribution of the highly cited papers and the highly cited papers by academic elites (Nobel Prize Winners and Price prize winners) will provide the feasible path to proof the Newton & Ortega (N&O?) hypothesis.This paper analyzes the highly cited papers from the filed of Library and Information Science included in SCI/SSCI, high cited papers from the field of Nanotechnology included in SCI/SSCI, the highly cited papers from the field of Library and Information Science included in CSSCI. And the papers which are published by academic elites in the field of Scientometrics and Nanotechnology included in SCI/SSCI (five Price prize winners in the field of Scientometrics and five Nobel Prize Winners in the field of Nanotechnology). We take the empirical study as foundation, utilizing the incomplete induction to analyze the highly cited papers information. Finally, we get the citing distribution characteristics of the highly cited papers to prove the Newton-Ortega hypothesis.The research shows that firstly the highly cited papers cite more highly cited papers, and the more highly cited papers tend to cite more highly cited paper. Secondly, the academic elites cite more highly cited papers. The research result supports the hypothesis from Newton to some extent, which is "if I have been able to see further, it was only because I stood on the shoulders of giants". So the academic elites take the role of mainstay in the academic research field.