The Right Job and the Job Right: Novelty, Impact and Journal Stratification in Science

Abstract

We introduce a new measurement of novelty based on the frequencies of pairwise combinations of article keywords. On the set of all research articles published from 1999 to 2013 in the journals referenced by the WoS (more than ten million papers), we find no evidence of shrinking novelty in science over that period. Novel contributions are more often performed in larger teams that span more institutional boundaries and geographic areas. High novelty increases both citations and the odds of a ?big hit? by more than forty percent but individual level returns to novelty may be low. In such a rapidly evolving environment, novelty is a lever for decreasing risk (not the reverse) as it increases the probability of addressing a problem that remains active in the future. We document that top journals play a very significant role in sustaining novelty in science.

Contingent Effects of Team Knowledge Diversity on Novelty in Management Research

“…We report our results with a 5-year time window as we assume short windows for can result in novelty scores are unstable. In addition, the short time frames in our robustness check allow for better comparisons of our findings with prior research, that commonly implements these short time frames to detect novelty (Uzzi et al 2013;Lee et al 2015;Carayol et al 2018). Both shorter time frames report stable results.…”

“…Academic teams are chosen to test the hypotheses, as the field of peer-reviewed science is especially exposed to the burden of knowledge and pressure to produce innovation and novelty (Jones 2009). The publication of scientific articles has been the subject of extensive research and has established scales to measure novelty that are valid and reproducible (Uzzi et al 2013;Lee et al 2015;Carayol et al 2018).…”

“…Last, we inverse the scale by multiplying it with -1 to derive a novelty score from the commonness value. We use the 10 th percentile score instead of the lowest value as it reduces noise (Uzzi et al 2013;Lee et al 2015;Carayol et al 2018). We set t to 5, hence the novelty score of each i-j journal pair is based on the prior 5 years.…”

Creativity in science and the link to cited references: Is the creative potential of papers reflected in their cited references?

“…Atypical combinations of knowledge while maintaining the advantages of conventional knowledge could also lead to innovativeness (Uzzi et al, 2013). Carayol, Lahatte, and Llopis (2017) propose a measurement of novelty which uses the frequencies of pairwise combinations of articles' keywords for the exploration of new research questions. This study indicates that the combination does not always offer remarkable benefits for creativity, however pairwise keyword novelty is strongly related to the articles' citation impact (Carayol et al, 2017).…”

“…Carayol, Lahatte, and Llopis (2017) propose a measurement of novelty which uses the frequencies of pairwise combinations of articles' keywords for the exploration of new research questions. This study indicates that the combination does not always offer remarkable benefits for creativity, however pairwise keyword novelty is strongly related to the articles' citation impact (Carayol et al, 2017). Koestler (1964) suggests the term 'bisociation' for human intellectual creativity.…”