How novelty in knowledge earns recognition: The role of consistent identities

Abstract

a b s t r a c tThe novelty of scientific or technological knowledge has a paradoxical dual implication. Highly novel ideas are subject to a higher risk of rejection by their evaluating audiences than incremental, "normal science" contributions. Yet the same audiences may deem a contribution to knowledge valuable because it is highly novel. This study develops and tests an explanation of this dual effect. It is argued that the recognition premium that highly acclaimed authors' work enjoys disproportionately accrues to work that is consistent with the authors' previously developed identity. Because high novelty is a salient identity marker, authors' past recognition for highly novel work helps same authors' new highly novel work earn positive audience valuation. It is further argued that, because recognition for novelty is partly inherited from mentors, disciples of highly acclaimed producers of novel work are more likely to have their work prized for its novelty. In contrast, the authors' or their mentors' recognition earned for relatively less novel work does not trigger similar spillover effects and leaves the authors vulnerable to the novelty discount. Unique data on the productivity, career histories, and mentoring relations of academic electrical engineers support these arguments.

Quantifying Conceptual Novelty in the Biomedical Literature

“…Trapido [18] discusses the effects of novelty on the recognition of authors. Their work shows that highly novel articles are at a higher risk of rejection.…”

“…A quantifiable measure of novelty of an article can help scholars in tracing the origin of concepts in science. Previously, scholars have used various methods for measuring novelty of an article and studied its correlation with its impact as well as correlation with collaboration patterns [19, 13, 12, 18]. Scholar's have also argued that novelty plays an important role in the evolution of science [19], while maintaining that novel articles are rare [19] and might not get enough attention early on [11, 16].…”

“…Scholar's have also argued that novelty plays an important role in the evolution of science [19], while maintaining that novel articles are rare [19] and might not get enough attention early on [11, 16]. Additionally, novelty has also been identified as new ideas [13, 12, 18] or unconventional pairings of exiting ones [19]. However, many of these methods suffer from issues related to noisy identification of relevant concepts [13, 12, 18] or don't identify what concepts make an article novel [19].…”

“…Additionally, novelty has also been identified as new ideas [13, 12, 18] or unconventional pairings of exiting ones [19]. However, many of these methods suffer from issues related to noisy identification of relevant concepts [13, 12, 18] or don't identify what concepts make an article novel [19]. We try to overcome this issue by using concepts identified by domain experts in a large corpus of biomedical articles and quantifying how novel the individual and pair of concepts on every article are.…”

Novelty and Foreseeing Research Trends: The Case of Astrophysics and Astronomy

“…This paper introduces to the reader and improves upon a fertile branch of these efforts that we may call "combinatorial innovation," which aims to theorize and model the process of innovation development and dissemination itself (Schilling & Green 2011, Uzzi et al 2013, Kaplan & Vakili 2015, Leahey & Moody 2014, Lee et al 2015, Youn et al 2015, Trapido 2015 for an extensive review see: Savino et al 2017). There are three goals The paper will test and compare different aggregation levels of reference list combinations to predict high impact papers in astronomy, more specifically examining how the operationalized definition of combinatorial novelty affects its relationship with citation impact.…”