Don't follow the leader: Independent thinkers create scientific innovation

01/06/2023
by   Sean Kelty, et al.
0

Academic success is distributed unequally; a few top scientists receive the bulk of attention, citations, and resources. However, do these “superstars" foster leadership in scientific innovation? We introduce three information-theoretic measures that quantify novelty, innovation, and impact from scholarly citation networks, and compare the scholarly output of scientists who are either not connected or strongly connected to superstar scientists. We find that while connected scientists do indeed publish more, garner more citations, and produce more diverse content, this comes at a cost of lower innovation and higher redundancy of ideas. Further, once one removes papers co-authored with superstars, the academic output of these connected scientists diminishes. In contrast, authors that produce innovative content without the benefit of collaborations with scientific superstars produce papers that connect a greater diversity of concepts, publish more, and have comparable citation rates, once one controls for transferred prestige of superstars. On balance, our results indicate that academia pays a price by focusing attention and resources on superstars.

READ FULL TEXT

page 9

page 25

research
09/04/2019

Diversity Breeds Innovation With Discounted Impact and Recognition

Prior work poses a diversity paradox for science. Diversity breeds scien...
research
02/25/2022

The evolution of scientific literature as metastable knowledge states

The problem of identifying common concepts in the sciences and deciding ...
research
08/12/2021

Bursting Scientific Filter Bubbles: Boosting Innovation via Novel Author Discovery

Isolated silos of scientific research and the growing challenge of infor...
research
06/24/2021

Stochastic modeling of scientific impact

Recent research has found that select scientists have a disproportional ...
research
07/12/2018

A network-based citation indicator of scientific performance

Scientists are embedded in social and information networks that influenc...
research
04/06/2022

Hammer PDF: An Intelligent PDF Reader for Scientific Papers

It is the most important way for researchers to acquire academic progres...
research
07/06/2023

Visualization Supporting Talent Portrait Generation:an Empirical Study

In today' s era of scientific and technological advancements, the import...

Please sign up or login with your details

Forgot password? Click here to reset