  In the last two decades, scholars have designed various types of
bibliographic related indicators to identify breakthrough-class academic
achievements. In this study, we take a further step to look at properties of
the promising disruptive index, thus deepening our understanding of this index
and further facilitating its wise use in bibliometrics. Using publication
records for Nobel laureates between 1900 and 2016, we calculate the DI of Nobel
Prize-winning articles and its benchmark articles in each year and use the
median DI to denote the central tendency in each year, and compare results
between Medicine, Chemistry, and Physics. We find that conclusions based on DI
depend on the length of their citation time window, and different citation time
windows may cause different, even controversial, results. Also, discipline and
time play a role on the length of citation window when using DI to measure the
innovativeness of a scientific work. Finally, not all articles with DI equals
to 1 were the breakthrough-class achievements. In other words, the DI stands up
theoretically, but we should not neglect that the DI was only shaped by the
number of citing articles and times the references have been cited, these data
may vary from database to database.
