Current Contents, the citation journal published "back then" by SSI (I think) had an inverse kind of metric: #citations / #articles. Thus, somebody who didn't

Current Contents, the citation journal published "back then" by SSI (I think) had an inverse kind of metric: #citations / #articles. Thus, somebody who didn't publish a lot but had lots of citations would have a big number. Conversely, somebody who published a lot but didn't get the citations would tend towards 1. When they tabulated this at one point in the 70's or early 80's, like 9 of 10 were Nobel Laureate who lead big groups (lots of papers AND lots of citations/paper). The other guy was Jimmy Stewart who wasn't a prof but created MOPAC the widely-used semi-empirical program. Each set of atomic parameterizations was a paper, and there were survey/overview. Given that this was in the public domain, and fast enough and good enough to use on a VAX, his 35 or so papers had an immense citation count. In summary, people to create the best ideas or even the best tools do ok. If you're a newbie with a year like Einstein's 1905 you'll probably turn out ok. And the Swedish Prize also tends to navigate towards impact.