  Newton's centuries-old wisdom of standing on the shoulders of giants raises a
crucial yet underexplored question: Out of all the prior works cited by a
discovery, which one is its giant? Here, we develop a novel,
discipline-independent method to identify the giant for any individual paper,
allowing us to systematically examine the role and characteristics of giants in
science. We find that across disciplines, about 95% of papers stand on the
shoulders of giants, yet the weight of scientific progress rests on relatively
few shoulders. Defining a new measure of giant index, we find that, while
papers with high citations are more likely to be giants, for papers with the
same citations, their giant index sharply predicts a paper's future impact and
prize-winning probabilities. Giants tend to originate from both small and large
teams, being either highly disruptive or highly developmental. And papers that
did not have a giant but later became a giant tend to be home-run papers that
are highly disruptive to science. Given the crucial importance of
citation-based measures in science, the developed concept of giants may offer a
useful new dimension in assessing scientific impact that goes beyond sheer
citation counts.
