Bias against novelty in science: A cautionary tale for users of bibliometric indicators

Abstract

for helpful comments. Financial support from KU Leuven (GOA/12/003) and the Research Foundation-Flanders (FWO, G.0825.12) is gratefully acknowledged. J. Wang also gratefully acknowledges a postdoctoral fellowship from FWO. Publication data are sourced from Thomson Reuters Web of Science Core Collection. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research. NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been peer-reviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications.

Context Factors and the Performance of Mobile Individuals in Research Teams

“…He finds that, while combinations made among rarely combined elements are associated on average with more uneven and less useful outcomes, at the same time they are associated with the likelihood of achieving extreme outcomes, including breakthroughs. A recent study of Wang et al (2016) finds a consistent result for published scientific research. Song et al (2003) show that the knowledge brought by mobile individuals to hiring firms is less likely to be reused when the recruit is employed in activities that are wellknown and core in the organization of destination.…”

“…It is common for scientists to pursue research on long-term projects and known areas of investigation, because this allows them to exploit the background knowledge, strategies and mental models acquired during prior research. A recent work estimates that a maximum of 11 per cent of the scientific papers in all subjects in 2001 could be considered creative, based on making novel knowledge combinations (Wang et al, 2016). It is less common for scientists to engage in entirely new streams of investigation, or to address themes where prior knowledge is extremely limited, or to tackle problems with an entirely new strategy.…”

“…This choice of setting offers several advantages, the most salient of which are: large portability of skills, [3] a set of tasks clearly oriented to innovation, and relatively standard ways to measure output characteristics and performances. It is drawn on recent works which focus on scientific research as a setting for studying international mobility (Franzoni et al, 2014;Freeman and Huang, 2015;Ganguli, 2015;Slavova et al, 2016) as well as work that conceptualizes science in a knowledge recombination framework (Fleming and Sorenson, 2004;Wang et al, 2016). We use an original sample of 4336 surveyed scientists located in 16 countries conducting research in the four disciplines of biology, chemistry, earth and environmental sciences and materials science.…”

Neophilia ranking of scientific journals

“…The emergent literature on novelty alone (e.g. Fleming 2001; Boudreau et al 2015; Uzzi et al 2013; Rzhetzky et al 2015; Wang et al 2015; Lee et al 2015; Packalen and Bhattacharya 2015c) shows that this one aspect of science — novelty — can be measured in many ways. We hope future work will explore ranking approaches that capture different aspects of novelty.…”

Five lessons from art for better research

“…Like artists who face rejection when innovating, researchers must handle a paradoxical bias against novelty in science: highly unique and influential articles often receive delayed recognition precisely because they are ahead of their time (Wang et al . ). Consequently, innovative research can be more difficult to publish and conflict with conventions and established interests.…”