Related papers: Is disruption decreasing, or is it accelerating?
Recently, Wu, Wang, and Evans (2019) and Bu, Waltman, and Huang (2019) proposed a new family of indicators, which measure whether a scientific publication is disruptive to a field or tradition of research. Such disruptive influences are…
Science is built on the scholarly consensus that shifts with time. This raises the question of how new and revolutionary ideas are evaluated and become accepted into the canon of science. Using two recently proposed metrics, we identify…
It is important to measure the disruption of academic papers. According to the characteristics of three different kinds of citations, this paper borrows musical vocabulary and names them solo citations (SC), duet citations (DC), and prelude…
Despite persistent efforts to understand the dynamics of creativity of scientists over careers in terms of productivity, impact, and prize, little is known about the dynamics of scientists' disruptive efforts that affect individual academic…
Following Funk and Owen-Smith (2017), Wu et al. (2019) proposed the disruption index (DI1) as a bibliometric indicator that measures disruptive and consolidating research. When we summarized the literature on the disruption index for our…
Empirical evidence demonstrates that citations received by scholarly publications follow a pattern of preferential attachment, resulting in a power-law distribution. Such asymmetry has sparked significant debate regarding the use of…
As science transitions from the age of lone geniuses to an era of collaborative teams, the question of whether large teams can sustain the creativity of individuals and continue driving innovation has become increasingly important. Our…
This study introduces the Disruption Index as a superior citation-based metric. This index quantitatively assesses the degree to which a publication redirects subsequent scholarly attention away from its preceding literature, thus measuring…
Scientists are increasingly overwhelmed by the volume of articles being published. Total articles indexed in Scopus and Web of Science have grown exponentially in recent years; in 2022 the article total was approximately ~47% higher than in…
Academic and scientific publishing practices have changed significantly in recent years. This paper presents an analysis of 17 million research papers published since 2000 to explore changes in authorship and content practices. It shows a…
The mechanisms driving different types of scientific innovation through collaboration remain poorly understood. Here we develop a comprehensive framework analyzing over 14 million papers across 19 disciplines from 1960 to 2020 to unpack how…
This paper challenges recent research (Evans, 2008) reporting that the concentration of cited scientific literature increases with the online availability of articles and journals. Using Thomson Reuters' Web of Science, the present paper…
The temporal dimension of citation accumulation poses fundamental challenges for quantitative research evaluations, particularly in assessing disruptive and consolidating research through the disruption index (D). While prior studies…
Institutions and their aggregates are not the right units of analysis for developing a science policy with cognitive goals in view. Institutions, however, can be compared in terms of their performance with reference to their previous…
The past few centuries have witnessed a dramatic growth in scientific and technological knowledge. However, the nature of that growth - whether exponential or otherwise - remains controversial, perhaps partly due to the lack of quantitative…
Retractions serve as an indicator of failures in research integrity, yet most analyses focus on absolute counts rather than risk per paper. We use one of the largest open bibliographic databases to develop incidence metrics normalized by…
The exponential increase in the number of scientific publications raises the question of whether the sciences are expanding into a fractured structure, making cross-field communication difficult. On the other hand, scientists may be…
In this paper we study research trends in condensed matter physics. Trends are analyzed by means of the the number of publications in the different sub-fields as function of the years. We found that many research topics have a similar…
Are the sciences not advancing at an ever increasing speed? We contrast this popular perspective with the view that science funding may actually see diminishing returns, at least regarding established fields. In order to stimulate a larger…
For decades the number of scientific publications has been rapidly increasing, effectively out-dating knowledge at a tremendous rate. Only few scientific milestones remain relevant and continuously attract citations. Here we quantify how…