Related papers: Which Discoveries Are Paradigm Shifting?
Progress in science and technology is punctuated by disruptive innovation and breakthroughs. Researchers have characterized these disruptions to explore the factors that spark such innovations and to assess their long-term trends. However,…
This paper outlines a framework for the study of innovation that treats discoveries as additions to evolving networks. As inventions enter they expand or limit the reach of the ideas they build on by influencing how successive discoveries…
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…
We consider inventions as novel combinations of existing technological capabilities. Patent data allow us to explicitly identify such combinatorial processes in invention activities. Unconsidered in the previous research, not every new…
Recent advances in the quantitative, computational methodology for the modeling and analysis of heterogeneous large-scale data are leading to new opportunities for understanding of human behaviors and faculties, including the manifestation…
Considering collaborative patent development, we provide micro-level evidence for innovation through exchanges of differentiated knowledge. Knowledge embodied in a patent is proxied by word pairs appearing in its abstract, while novelty is…
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…
A growing literature has examined whether innovation is becoming less disruptive, spanning diverse domains and data sources and using a range of methodologies. This paper provides an inventory of 105 studies exploring this question. The…
Novelty evaluation is vital for the promotion and management of innovation. With the advancement of information techniques and the open data movement, some progress has been made in novelty measurements. Tracking and reviewing novelty…
In order to create new products, inventors search and combine previous ideas. Few studies have examined the characteristics of search that lead to new products; most have focused on patent citations, which are often retrospective and may…
The CD index is a widely used measure of disruptive inventions. Most studies compute it using USPTO data. This creates a puzzle because the US appears less disruptive than European and Asian countries. We show that this largely stems from…
Scientists and inventors set the direction of their work amidst an evolving landscape of questions, opportunities, and challenges. This paper introduces a measurement framework to quantify how far researchers move from their existing…
New scientific ideas drive progress, yet measuring scientific novelty remains challenging. We use natural language processing to detect the origin and impact of new ideas in scientific publications. To validate our methods, we analyze Nobel…
Invention has been commonly conceptualized as a search over a space of combinatorial possibilities. Despite the existence of a rich literature, spanning a variety of disciplines, elaborating on the recombinant nature of invention, we lack a…
Concerns over reproducibility in science extend to research using existing healthcare data; many observational studies investigating the same topic produce conflicting results, even when using the same data. To address this problem, we…
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…
Novel scientific knowledge is constantly produced by the scientific community. Understanding the level of novelty characterized by scientific literature is key for modeling scientific dynamics and analyzing the growth mechanisms of…
Science progresses by building upon previous discoveries. It is commonly believed that the impact of scientific papers, as measured by citations, is positively correlated with the impact of past discoveries built upon. However, analyzing…
We propose a framework that recasts scientific novelty not as a single attribute of a paper, but as a reflection of its position within the evolving intellectual landscape. We decompose this position into two orthogonal dimensions:…
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…