Novelty is an essential feature of creative ideas, yet the building blocks of new ideas are often embodied in existing knowledge. From this perspective, balancing atypical knowledge with conventional knowledge may be critical to the link between innovativeness and impact. Our analysis of 17.9 million papers spanning all scientific fields suggests that science follows a nearly universal pattern: The highest-impact science is primarily grounded in exceptionally conventional combinations of prior work yet simultaneously features an intrusion of unusual combinations. Papers of this type were twice as likely to be highly cited works. Novel combinations of prior work are rare, yet teams are 37.7% more likely than solo authors to insert novel combinations into familiar knowledge domains.

Research articles produced through international collaboration are more highly cited than other work, but are they also more novel? Using measures developed by Uzzi et al. (2013), and replicated by Boyack and Klavans (2014), this article tests for novelty and conventionality in international research collaboration. Scholars have found that coauthored articles are more novel and have suggested that diverse groups have a greater chance of producing creative work. As such, we expected to find that international collaboration tends to produce more novel research.Using data from Web of Science and Scopus in 2005, we failed to show that international collaboration tends to produce more novel articles. In fact, international collaboration appears to produce less novel and more conventional knowledge combinations. Transaction costs and communication barriers to international collaboration may suppress novelty. Higher citations to international work may be explained by an audience effect, where more authors from more countries results in greater access to a larger citing community. The findings are consistent with explanations of growth in international collaboration that posit a social dynamic of preferential attachment based upon reputation.

Papers or patents that cite past work of a particular age distribution double their chances of being a hit.

Einstein believed that mentors are especially influential in a protégé’s intellectual development, yet the link between mentorship and protégé success remains a mystery. We marshaled genealogical data on nearly 40,000 scientists who published 1,167,518 papers in biomedicine, chemistry, math, or physics between 1960 and 2017 to investigate the relationship between mentorship and protégé achievement. In our data, we find groupings of mentors with similar records and reputations who attracted protégés of similar talents and expected levels of professional success. However, each grouping has an exception: One mentor has an additional hidden capability that can be mentored to their protégés. They display skill in creating and communicating prizewinning research. Because the mentor’s ability for creating and communicating celebrated research existed before the prize’s conferment, protégés of future prizewinning mentors can be uniquely exposed to mentorship for conducting celebrated research. Our models explain 34–44% of the variance in protégé success and reveals three main findings. First, mentorship strongly predicts protégé success across diverse disciplines. Mentorship is associated with a 2×-to-4× rise in a protégé’s likelihood of prizewinning, National Academy of Science (NAS) induction, or superstardom relative to matched protégés. Second, mentorship is significantly associated with an increase in the probability of protégés pioneering their own research topics and being midcareer late bloomers. Third, contrary to conventional thought, protégés do not succeed most by following their mentors’ research topics but by studying original topics and coauthoring no more than a small fraction of papers with their mentors.