Convergent validity of several indicators measuring disruptiveness with milestone assignments to physics papers by experts

The association between topic growth and citation impact of research publications

“…The growing number of publications in a topic may be due to disruptive publications existing in the topic (Funk & Owen-Smith, 2017;Wu et al, 2019). Bornmann and Tekles (2021) argue that indicators of disruption is linked to the theory of Kuhn (1996) in which science is not seen as stable and cumulative, but rather as occasionally shifting focus and being transformed by novel ideas and breakthroughs. Disruptive publications may therefore be the starting point of new topics and may spur a growing number of publications in the topic, and thereby a lot of citations to the early publications within the topic.…”

“…Thelwall and Sud (2021) showed that new research topics are cited more in some disciplines and emerging topics were found to benefit from both within-and outside-field citation links (Kwon et al, 2019). Bornmann and Tekles (2021) argue that new topics are built upon so called disruptive publications, i.e. publications characterized by their ability to overthrow established thinking (Bornmann et al, 2020).…”

“…Thelwall and Sud (2021) showed that new research topics are cited more in some disciplines and emerging topics were found to benefit from both within-and outside-field citation links (Kwon et al, 2019). Bornmann and Tekles (2021) argue that new topics are built upon so called disruptive publications. Newness (or novelty) together with the fast growth of publications in an area is predicted to lead to prominent impact in the future (Rotolo et al, 2015) and recent research has shown that new topics have a citation advantage (Thelwall & Sud, 2021).…”

The local structure of citation networks uncovers expert-selected milestone papers

“…The simplest and most intuitive local metric is the number of citations (Price, 2011;Garfield, 2006), which takes into account only direct citations in the citation network and ignores the heterogeneous significance of the citing papers (Maslov and Redner, 2008). Because of this, citation count ( and its extensions, such as relative citation rates (Radicchi and Castellano, 2011)) may fail to recognise groundbreaking articles which are modestly cited due to various reasons (Maslov and Redner, 2008;Bornmann and Tekles, 2020).…”

“…On the one hand, the number of citations received by a scientific paper has a more straightforward interpretation, it can be easily accessed via scientific research databases such as Google Scholar and Web of Science, and it can be rapidly computed (Waltman, 2016). On the other hand, the citation count weighs all citations the same, regardless of their origin, and it might be inadequate to identify groundbreaking research (Maslov and Redner, 2008;Bornmann and Tekles, 2020). To overcome this limitation, Google's PageRank (Brin and Page, 1998) and other network-based metrics build on the plausible premise that a citation from an important paper with few references should be weighted more than a citation from an obscure paper with many references (Chen et al, 2007;Maslov and Redner, 2008;Walker et al, 2007).…”