Lets start from Psychoanalysis with Sigmud Freud (the most cited scientist of all eras) and Alfred Adler, Erik Erikson, Carl Jung, Karen Horney.
In Physics we have Albert Einstein,Isaac Newton, James Clerk Maxwell, Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg.
In Sociology Emile Durkheim, Max Weber, Charles Wright Mills, Daniel Bell, Erving Goffman.
We ca continue.
Do you agree that - approximately - every scientific field is dominated by five persons?
Maybe five names are dominating but not five persons. "Five persons" strongly suggest some kind of conspiracy, while this is certainly not the case. In your example, taken from physics, only two last scientists could contact each other and have personal relations.
By the way: is your hypothesis valid in case of philosophy too? Probably not. Anyway, if you ask somebody about 'big names' in arbitrary area then the answer you get will be most likely limited, to five names at most. And the other person, from the same area as the first one, may cite at most five other names. One person will speak about Marx, but not the second.
It is a weird situation, I thought of 'five' without a strong statistical proof but rather as a simplified phenomenological observation.
Well I don't write of it as a conspiracy, but as a proxy for the existence of 'strange attractors' (taken from Rossler chaos theory) in Science.
I think that you will agree that for sub -fields there always exist a small group of scientists with a kind of hierarchy: the founder, his/her first assistant and a few later followers. That group, given our peer reviewed publication system, decided what will or will not be published in the related top journals.
Haven't you face that?
Of course I agree that such small groups really exist, that's natural. Such a group is influential in a given journal but almost surely not in another one involved in the same or similar area of investigations. On the other hand some journals are much more prestigious that other.
That concentration is not good for evolution of ideas.
I think there exist too many "small groups" as you wrote that dominate at almost all sub-fields and drop all novel papers, because they are against their dominance.
No, there has been some who has been expert and can be easily numbered in works and recognition, so in that point of view, there would be always “five majors”, but tons of it in reality.
Maybe the following, somewhat pessimistic, citation should be included in this thread:
A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.
/-/ Max Planck
It seems a bit strange every scientific field to be dominated by five persons. Where are the others?
Regards
Dear Aristides,
It was a provocateur title.
It doesn't matter if they are five, six, seven or whatever.
Do you agree that they are always a few persons?
Yes, dear Demetris, this is the case. A smart minority which, sometimes (or perhaps many times), struggle to maintain the ''monopoly on their truth''.
This generalization is not correct. I am sure I can cite more than 10 in physics and chemistry!
Dear George,
Yes, but 'if they put a gun in your head' (metaphorically) then you'd probably be satisfied with less than 10...
Perhaps jealousy is one of the right terms to describe the feelings of those being outside the big five. The obvious way to enter this club is to present convincingly something really new and exciting. Or the good, constructive explanation of something widely known (familiar) but still poorly understood. Or valuable generalization, often described with catchy terms (see the word 'topological' in solid state physics). Easy to say, but how to do it? Well, hard work is usually not enough, some luck is indispensable.
Jealous is a strange story.
I agree that exists, however I think that best solution is not to fight the 'big 5' of a specific field, it is more effective to begin a new field alone.
Otherwise you will spend your life by analyzing and following other peoples's thoughts and lives.
That would be a hypothesis to check. For example, name 5 fields of science and check the citation indexes and publication index. If the top 5 have 80% of the total, then your hypothesis is not disproved. However there is much criticism on both of these indexes.
Statistically, the economist Pareto found that 20% of any group will generate 80% of the results. That is a “normal” distribution.
your question could also be applied to Youtube stars, instagram influencers etc. Is it just 5 persons who “dominate” or is it 20%?
However, I don’t think that any doctoral thesis that names only 5 authors in the bibliography will pass the examination.
It depend on how you define domination and where you draw the line of most significant ones in each field. Moreover, scientists will continue to emerge on planet earth. In my view, mankind discoveries didnot reveal more than 1% of nature universal laws. Still a long way to go.