Related papers: New Directions in Science Emerge from Disconnectio…
The combination of diverse, pre-existing knowledge is a common explanation for scientific breakthroughs. However, a paradox exists: while scientific output and the potential for such recombination have grown exponentially, the rate of…
New ideas are often thought to arise from recombining existing knowledge. Yet despite rapid publication growth - and expanding opportunities for recombination - scientific breakthroughs remain rare. This gap between productivity and…
The impact and originality are two critical dimensions for evaluating scientific publications, measured by citation and disruption metrics respectively. Despite the extensive effort made to understand the statistical properties and…
Over the last four decades, the way knowledge is created in academia has transformed dramatically: research teams have grown larger, scholars draw from ever-wider pools of prior work, and the most influential discoveries increasingly emerge…
Innovation or the creation and diffusion of new material, social and cultural things in society has been widely studied in sociology and across the social sciences, with investigations sufficiently diverse and dispersed to make them…
We stand at the foot of a significant inflection in the trajectory of scientific discovery. As society continues on its fast-paced digital transformation, so does humankind's collective scientific knowledge and discourse. We now read and…
Using large-scale citation data and a breakthrough metric, the study systematically evaluates the inevitability of scientific breakthroughs. We find that scientific breakthroughs emerge as multiple discoveries rather than singular events.…
Despite extensive research on scientific disruption, two questions remain: why disruption has declined amid growing knowledge, and why disruptive work receives fewer and delayed citations. One way to address these questions is to identify…
Theories of scientific and technological change view discovery and invention as endogenous processes, wherein prior accumulated knowledge enables future progress by allowing researchers to, in Newton's words, "stand on the shoulders of…
Breakthrough discoveries and inventions involve unexpected combinations of contents including problems, methods, and natural entities, and also diverse contexts such as journals, subfields, and conferences. Drawing on data from tens of…
The growth of science and technology is a recombinative process, wherein new discoveries and inventions are built from prior knowledge. Yet relatively little is known about the manner in which scientific and technological knowledge develop…
How nations shape the scientific frontier matters for technological competition, but standard metrics, including publication counts, citations, and disruption indices, look backward and fail to distinguish between fundamentally different…
The development of inventions is theorized as a process of searching and recombining existing knowledge components. Previous studies under this theory have examined myriad characteristics of recombined knowledge and their performance…
Philosophers of science have long postulated how collective scientific knowledge grows. Empirical validation has been challenging due to limitations in collecting and systematizing large historical records. Here, we capitalize on the…
Many theories of scientific and technological progress imagine science as an iterative, developmental process periodically interrupted by innovations which disrupt and restructure the status quo. Due to the immense societal value created by…
Recent research on the decline in the paper disruption index (D-index) has sparked heated debates among scholars and garnered significant attention from policymakers and research institution leaders globally. To bridge the gap between…
Knowledge production is often viewed as an endogenous process in which discovery arises through the recombination of existing theories, findings, and concepts. Yet given the vast space of potential recombinations, not all are equally…
Discursive knowledge emerges as codification in flows of communication. The flows of communication are constrained and enabled by networks of communications as their historical manifestations at each moment of time. New publications modify…
How does the topological space of science emerge? Inspired by the concept of maps of science, i.e. mapping scientific topics to a scientific space, we ask which topological structure a dynamical process of authors collaborating and…
Metrics based on reference lists of research articles or on keywords have been used to predict citation impact. The concept behind such metrics is that original ideas stem from the reconfiguration of the structure of past knowledge, and…