Related papers: Knowledge Independence Breeds Disruption but Limit…
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…
Theories of innovation emphasize the role of social networks and teams as facilitators of breakthrough discoveries. Around the world, scientists and inventors today are more plentiful and interconnected than ever before. But while there are…
Initially developed to capture technical innovation and later adapted to identify scientific breakthroughs, the Disruption Index (D-index) offers the first quantitative framework for analyzing transformative research. Despite its promise,…
Overconfidence is a prevalent problem and particularly consequential in its relation with scientific knowledge: being unaware of one`s own ignorance can affect behaviours and threaten public policies and health. We introduce both analytical…
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…
Knowledge amount is an integral indicator of the development of society. Humanity produces knowledge in response to challenges from nature and society. Knowledge production depends on population size and human productivity. Productivity is…
It is a matter of debate whether a shrinking proportion of scholarly literature is getting most of the references over time. It is also less well understood how a narrowing literature usage would affect the circulation of ideas in the…
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.…
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…
The advancement of science is inherently dependent on the recombination of existing knowledge, and innovative research typically relies on the atypical recombination of established knoweldge bases. This study introduces a Knowledge…
Science is a growing system, exhibiting ~4% annual growth in publications and ~1.8% annual growth in the number of references per publication. Combined these trends correspond to a 12-year doubling period in the total supply of references,…
Evaluating the disruptive nature of academic ideas is a new area of research evaluation that moves beyond standard citation-based metrics by taking into account the broader citation context of publications or patents. The "$CD$ index" and a…
While artificial intelligence has the potential to process vast amounts of data, generate new insights, and unlock greater productivity, its widespread adoption may entail unforeseen consequences. We identify conditions under which AI, by…
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…
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…
Through systematic empirical investigation, we uncover a fundamental and concerning property of Large Language Models: while they can safely learn facts that don't contradict their knowledge, attempting to update facts with contradictory…
Disagreement is essential to scientific progress. However, the extent of disagreement in science, its evolution over time, and the fields in which it happens, remains poorly understood. Leveraging a massive collection of English-language…
The exponential growth in scientific publications poses a severe challenge for human researchers. It forces attention to more narrow sub-fields, which makes it challenging to discover new impactful research ideas and collaborations outside…
Establishing an independent academic identity is a central yet insufficiently understood challenge for early-career researchers. However, limited resources and mentor-driven research agendas often constrain early efforts toward autonomy. To…
Similar to how innovations often find success in fields other than their original domains, in this study we explore whether the same holds true for scientific discoveries. We investigate the flow of knowledge across scientific disciplines,…