SoylentNews

"gewg_" writes us about an El Reg report:

Forget the critics' opinion, audience figures, or box office take. What really sets a film apart is the number of times it's later referenced in other moving pictures.

That's according to a Northwestern University team led by Luis Amaral, which set out to determine what criterion best predicted a work's inclusion in the US Library of Congress's National Film Registry as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".

After conducting a "a big data study of 15,425 US-produced films listed in the Internet Movie Database (IMDb)", which applied both subjective metrics--"(critical reviews, awards, public opinion) and objective (citations, box office sales)"--the conclusion was that these weren't as accurate in predicting Film Registry glory as how many nods a work received in subsequent flicks.

[The study put] Star Wars and Psycho into second and third spots in the significance league table. [...] the fourth and fifth most significant silver screen outings were Casablanca and Gone With the Wind.

Amaral's ultimate aim is to develop a method for determining "the most significant scientific papers".

He explained: "More than 1 million scientific papers are published each year worldwide. It can be difficult to distinguish a good scientific paper from an average one, much like the movies. My next goal is to develop a good measure of scientific citations to get inside what is going on in the scientific literature."

Readers can judge for themselves the significance of the Northwestern University study--dubbed Cross-evaluation of metrics to estimate the significance of creative works--when it appears in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).