  When a research infrastructure is funded and implemented, new information and
new publications are created. This new information is the measurable output of
discovery process. In this paper, we describe the impact of infrastructure for
physics experiments in terms of publications and citations. In particular, we
consider the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiments (ATLAS, CMS, ALICE, LHCb)
and compare them to the Large Electron Positron Collider (LEP) experiments
(ALEPH, DELPHI, L3, OPAL) and the Tevatron experiments (CDF, D0). We provide an
overview of the scientific output of these projects over time and highlight the
role played by remarkable project results in the publication-citation
distribution trends. The methodological and technical contribution of this work
provides a starting point for the development of a theoretical model of modern
scientific knowledge propagation over time.
