Highly cited researches represent most influential scientific minds in the world that are highly regarded by many researchers. “Dwarfs standing on the shoulders of giants”, but where the giants are standing on remains unclear. In this study, we have selected 468787 research publications in computer science in ArnetMiner and analyzed the citation topic distribution to observe how and to what extent prior work is combined. We have found that there is a novelty and conventionality combination in different impact papers at reference topic level, but their features are distinct. Our result shows that highly cited papers have more novel combination than middle and lowly cited papers relatively in reference topic pairs and there is a remarkable variation range for this phenomenon
