Effect of the topic-combination novelty on the disruption and impact of scientific articles: Evidence from PubMed

Abstract

Novelty, disruption and impact are essential concepts for understanding the originality and importance of scientific discoveries. By drawing on a large-scale corpus consisting of nearly 0.9 million PubMed papers published between 1970 and 2009 and their citations before 2018 in the Web of Science, we found that the topic-combination novelty has different effects on the impact and disruption of scientific papers, that is, an inverted U-shaped effect on the impact and a positive effect on disruption. One of our contributions is that we have significantly improved the reliability of topic-combination novelty by applying MeSH terms of PubMed to the measurement of novelty. Another contribution is that we have explained how a novel combination of MeSH terms of an article contributes to citations and citation networks, that is, the middle-level novelty is more likely to achieve large citation counts. In contrast, high topic-combination novelty relates to the discontinuity in the focal paper’s citation network.

Exploring and evaluating the index for interdisciplinary breakthrough innovation detection

“…Foster et al (2013) also measured novelty by introducing new chemical entities in a study. Ruan et al (2023) explored the relationship between the novelty of topic combinations and the disruptive and impactful nature of papers using MeSH terms. Their findings indicated moderate novelty yields a more significant impact, while high novelty leads to more substantial disruption.…”

“…(2013) also measured novelty by introducing new chemical entities in a study. Ruan et al. (2023) explored the relationship between the novelty of topic combinations and the disruptive and impactful nature of papers using MeSH terms.…”