Bias against Novelty in Science: A Cautionary Tale for Users of Bibliometric Indicators

By Jian Wang, Reinhilde Veugelers, Paula E. Stephan. 2017

574 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Research which explores unchartered waters has a high potential for major impact but also carries a high uncertainty of having minimal impact. Such explorative research is often described as taking a novel approach. This study examines the complex relationship between pursuing a novel approach and impact. We measure novelty by examining the extent to which a published paper makes first time ever combinations of referenced journals, taking into account the difficulty of making such combinations. We apply this newly developed measure of novelty to a set of one million research articles across all scientific disciplines. We find that highly novel papers, defined to be those that make more (distinct) new combinations, have more than a triple probability of being a top 1% highly cited paper when using a sufficiently long citation time window to assess impact. Moreover, follow-on papers that cite highly novel research are themselves more likely to be highly cited. However, novel research is also risky as it has a higher variance in the citation performance. These findings are consistent with the “high risk/high gain” characteristic of novel research. We also find that novel papers are typically published in journals with a lower than expected Impact Factor and are less cited when using a short time window. Our findings suggest that science policy, in particular funding decisions which are over reliant on traditional bibliometric indicators based on short-term direct citation counts and Journal Impact Factors, may be biased against novelty.

Subfields: Information Systems and Management, Statistics and Probability

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ad1815b9966249819fb0b9472e8591524fa449b2

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In Information Systems and Management

H. Eugene Stanley

In Statistics and Probability

Citations in the corpus

The science of science: from the perspective of complex systems (2017, background): “found that paperswith high novelty asmeasured by atypical combinations tend to be less cited at the beginning, yet more likely to be highly cited after it has been published for three or more years [386,387].”
Frontier Knowledge and Scientific Production: Evidence from the Collapse of International Science (2018, background): “The existing literature has shown that papers that cite “atypical combinations” of references are more likely to become a “hit” (Uzzi et al., 2013; Wang et al., 2016), as are papers that predominantly cite recent as well as some older references (Mukher- 2Increased funding for universities and the…”
Scientific novelty and technological impact (2019, background): “At the same time, previous research has shown that novel research is less likely to be published in high impact factor journals (Wang et al., 2017), which in turn might impede the technological impact of novel science.”