Quantifying Conceptual Novelty in the Biomedical Literature

Abstract

We introduce several measures of novelty for a scientific article in MEDLINE based on the temporal profiles of its assigned Medical Subject Headings (MeSH). First, temporal profiles for all MeSH terms (and pairs of MeSH terms) were characterized empirically and modelled as logistic growth curves. Second, a paper's novelty is captured by its youngest MeSH (and pairs of MeSH) as measured in years and volume of prior work. Across all papers in MEDLINE published since 1985, we find that individual concept novelty is rare (2.7% of papers have a MeSH ≤ 3 years old; 1.0% have a MeSH ≤ 20 papers old), while combinatorial novelty is the norm (68% have a pair of MeSH ≤ 3 years old; 90% have a pair of MeSH ≤ 10 papers old). Furthermore, these novelty measures exhibit complex correlations with article impact (as measured by citations received) and authors' professional age.

Self-citation is the hallmark of productive authors, of any gender

“…The novelty of an article or reference is determined by the relative frequency of its associated MeSH terms [ 44 , 45 ]. The novelty scores score and ref.…”

“…Several of these features capture known motivations for self-citation narrowly, and citation broadly: (a) prior citations: authors tend to cite papers that have previously received citations; (b) time: one cannot (typically) cite papers that do not yet exist and self-citations might appear sooner [ 48 ]; (c) publication count: an author cannot self-cite if they don’t have any published (or working) papers; (d) language [ 43 ]: one is less likely to cite papers that one cannot understand [ 49 ]; (e) disciplinary barriers and topical diversity (encoded by indicating whether the article and its reference were published in the same or similar journal as captured by the exact name match and the implicit journal score [ 46 ] which is similar to author odds ratio [ 47 ]): academic careers often depend on intra- vs. inter-disciplinary citations and scientists who jump from one topic to another are less likely to cite themselves; (e) accessibility and discoverability: what one cites may be limited by how easy it is to find and obtain physically [ 50 ]; (f) publication type [ 43 ]: one may cite writing , not necessarily research ; literature reviews tend to cited more often; (g) novelty or topical narrowness: articles on young topics tend to be cited more often [ 44 ]; (h) collaboration size: as the number of co-authors increases, the individual opportunity for self-citation may decrease.…”

Interdisciplinarity as diversity in citation patterns among journals: Rao-Stirling diversity, relative variety, and the Gini coefficient

“…Policymakers and researchers continue to be interested in measures of "interdisciplinarity" (Wagner et al, 2011). Recently, a great deal of attention has been paid to using references as a way to measure "interdisciplinarity" (e.g., Boyack & Klavans, 2014;Mishra & Torvik, 2016;Tahamtan & Bornmann, 2018;Wang, 2016), These analyses are notable because of the increasing consensus, following Rao (1982) and Stirling (2007), for defining interdisciplinarity as diversity encompassing three features: variety, balance, and disparity. However, a problem arises when measuring the interrelationships among the three components: how can they be combined without losing either information or validity?…”

Rediscovering Don Swanson:The Past, Present and Future of Literature-based Discovery

“…One may hope to identify such publications by looking for newly published articles that contain novel combinations of text terms (Packalen & Bhattacharya, 2015), novel combinations of Medical Subject Headings (Mishra & Torvik, 2016; Peng et al, 2017), or whose reference lists cite novel combinations of journals (Uzzi et al, 2013). This leads to a model of literature-based discovery that is based on link prediction on networks.…”