In terms of education Nassim Taleb mentioned an interesting concept in his book Antifragile and the recent conversation with Daniel Kahneman. “Time is a great tester of Antifragility. Odds are that the young man will outlive the old gentleman but for books or movies it is the other way around. If a book has been in print for thousand years it will probably be in print for further thousand years. If an idea has been in fashion for 50 years it will be also relevant for the next 50 years. So time detects fragility and takes care of it.”
Out of this we can determine two factors for the importance of something for our education time (easy to measure) + fashion (best seller, citations, attention over time). On the other hand this concept per se argues against visiting academic conferences, odds are that 90% will just be noise or reading the daily newspaper. You waste to much of your time with noise. Time is limited so focus on the important stuff. A university understanding this principal is Cambridge putting strong emphasis on historical and still relevant ideas. In terms of economics this means back to the roots (Keynes, Minsky, Hayek, Bentham and so on).
A first filter in terms of papers can be found here:
http://ideas.repec.org/top/top.item.nbcites.html
In conclusion this means only that time detects the impact that does not mean it is the truth!
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