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What Types of Novelty Are Most Disruptive?

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Novelty and impact are key characteristics of the scientific enterprise. Erin Leahey discusses different types of novelty (new results, new theories, and new methods) and whether a scientific offering has a consolidating form of influence (bringing renewed attention to foundational ideas) or a disruptive one (prompting subsequent scholars to overlook them).

Ivory Orchid Photography: Kristin Gray

Image courtesy of interviewee. December 19, 2023

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The presented text discusses research by sociologists of science funded by the NSF, focusing on the concepts of disruption and innovation in scientific work. The researchers, led by Gina Lee and others, aim to clarify the relationship between novelty and disruption, noting that novelty is multidimensional; not all novel works are necessarily disruptive.

They differentiate between various types of novelty in scholarly articles: new results, new theories, and new methods. Surprisingly, they found that new results often did not lead to significant disruption in the field. In contrast, new theories were generally more consolidating, reinforcing existing streams of knowledge, while new methods were found to be more disruptive, suggesting they are more adaptable across disciplines.

The researchers utilized citation classics—essays written by highly cited scientists reflected upon their impactful works—to analyze the influence and disruption associated with their research. Their findings indicate that the type of novelty matters significantly in understanding how scientific knowledge evolves, leading to the conclusion that a nuanced understanding of novelty is crucial in studying scientific influence and impact. The distinction between types of novelty is seen as essential for grasping the dynamics of scientific progress.

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We are sociologists of science, right?

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We have this funding from NSF and Rest Funk.

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And, and Gina Lee

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and I, we're really, really curious about,

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disruption and some of the correlates

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of disruption and innovation.

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And, we proposed to look at novelty, right?

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Um, I think a lot of people in the literature,

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confuse the two and think that a novel work is, for example,

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a disruptive work, right?

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Um, something new is gonna shake things up, right?

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And especially if it's a new discovery.

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And so we interrogate that, a little bit.

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And, one of the ways we do that is we say, well,

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we, novelty is not just unit dimensional.

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Some work is more novel, some work is less novel.

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Most work is somewhere in the middle

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and presenting a new thing, right?

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Or a new idea. And we, we start to, in this paper,

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really look at the types of novelty,

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that a scientific work might present a book,

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a published research article.

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We don't look at patents,

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but Russ has looked at patents in his previous work, right?

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Um, in what ways is a scholarly journal article

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new, if at all, some paper, some papers, surprisingly

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it was about a fifth of them in our dataset, right?

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Weren't, new, in, in any way. Um, right?

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So, we looked at different types of novelties.

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Some papers might dev might share a new

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result, a new finding.

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Oh, here's something that no one,

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no other scientist has found before.

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That would be a new result.

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Some papers maybe develop a new theory, right?

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A new explanation for something, right?

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Uh, maybe including, you know, pathways or whatnot.

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So here's a new explanation or new theory.

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Some papers do that

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and some papers, develop new techniques

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or methods, maybe a new scale

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or index, like the CD index that we use in this paper.

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That that's an instance of a new method, a new way

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to measure something, a new goodness of fit statistic,

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et cetera.

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So we really look at types of novelty in this paper,

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including theories and methods and the prototypical results.

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The term that, Russ Funk

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and Jason Owen Smith originally used

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when they developed the term.

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Um, they distinguish between consolidating at one end.

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So some, some papers

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or patents can have a consolidating influence on a stream

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of knowledge on the literature, and other patents

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or papers can have a more destabilizing influence.

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That's actually what the D stood for,

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in the original paper.

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And, yeah, I can, I, the,

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consolidating work is,

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I wouldn't call it more incremental,

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but more deeply, engaged with

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and, connected to,

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and incorporating, past work

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and prior work, sorry, past work

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and future work, right?

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And connecting those.

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And really, so a consolidating paper really is making those

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connections across generations of scholarship.

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Whereas a more destabilizing paper

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or disruptive paper is kind of severing those ties

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between the past work and the future work, right?

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Or serving to kind of disconnect them

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and maybe take the literature

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or that stream of knowledge in a new direction.

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Rerouted a little bit. Yeah, we did a lot of digging in.

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We were, I think a, a little bit surprised, and,

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and, and happy 'cause that meant that maybe there's room

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for a contribution from us.

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Um, we were a little surprised about

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the state of the literature.

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So we, we, we dug back to kind of classic sociology

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of science philosophy and history of science.

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How did new ideas come about? How do things change?

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A lot of that work was, very, theoretical in nature.

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Um, a little bit abstract.

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Um, the empirical work in there was maybe more,

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historical comparative based on,

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some particular cases and talk of cases.

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And, yeah.

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And we thought that a lot of the recent work in,

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this kind of new, interdisciplinary,

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maybe subfield called the Science of Science

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that is using more quantitative approaches

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to understand questions like these,

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that there was a little bit of a disconnect

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between the current empirical work

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and this kind of classic, theoretical,

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historical comparative work, right?

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The classic work was really trying to understand

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how ideas relate to each other, how,

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and one idea, one new idea might supersede an old idea.

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Uh, and we weren't really seeing that being captured

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in the current empirical work.

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We found some really, really cool data

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that I had used in a previous, project,

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with Cindy Kane, also funded by the NSF.

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And the cool data that we identified are called

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citation classics, essays.

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They're on a website.

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Anyone can go and download all of them just like we did.

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Um, these are one page essays, written

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by highly cited scientists.

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So, Eugene Garfield, the founder of the Web of Science,

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when a paper, this is back in the day,

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the data are, are a little dated.

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They're a little old. Uh,

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if your paper received some discipline specific threshold,

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like, you know, passed some threshold of number

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of citations, you know, in a smaller field,

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it might only be like math.

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It might only be 75 citations.

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He would probably couldn't email you back then.

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Just write you a letter and say, Hey, your, give you a call

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and say, Hey, your paper is a citation classic.

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Would you please write a little essay about your work

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and, how it originated

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and what were some of the challenges you experienced

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and, why you think it's been so useful

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to the scientific community?

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So these one-page essays written

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by highly cited scientists about their work

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are available online.

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Um, there are not too, too many of them.

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We pretty much grabbed every single one that we could.

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And then we linked them

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to the article that they are talking about.

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Where is that highly cited article?

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We went and grabbed that from the web of science

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and all sorts of data about that,

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including its citation patterns.

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What works are showing up in its bibliography, what kind

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of works are citing it.

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So we could look at the citation patterns to measure,

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the nature of scientific influence specifically,

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disruption in the essays.

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The, these, these scholars

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or scientists are, they're typically writing them about a

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decade after their paper was published,

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and they're reflecting on this paper that,

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that has been so highly cited.

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And they sometimes are using words like, well,

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I thought my paper, you know, maybe my paper was useful

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to the scientific community

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because I really, you know, I developed this new technique

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and da, da da.

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So we would code those essays, right?

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If they say a word, a synonym for novelty,

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and if they say a, a synonym for method like technique

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in the same sentence, we would kind of code that as,

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new method.

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They think their work, you know, developed

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and shared a, a new method.

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Um, and so that's how we, we

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captured the key independent variable in our study,

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which is types of novelty.

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So I think maybe the most surprising finding is that the,

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you know, that prototypical type of novelty, new result,

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new finding discovery, didn't seem to have a,

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kind of consistent effect on disruption.

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Um, if anything, it was a little bit negative,

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but not regularly, statistically significant in some

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of our robustness checks.

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So for the most part, that's not the main story, right?

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What is the main story is that the two other types

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of novelty we study do have really interesting effects.

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We find that new theories, are

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less likely to be disruptive.

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Okay? So more on the consolidating end of that, of

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that index, that Russ and Jason developed,

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and new methods are more likely to be disruptive.

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New theories, tend to consolidate streams of literature.

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Why is this the case? Why do we think this is the case?

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And here, some of this classic sociology of science work,

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I think really, really helps us.

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Um, so if you are a theorist, if you want to build theory,

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you need to start with theory, right?

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What's already out there?

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And maybe you, maybe you're refining it

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or maybe you're tweaking it,

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or maybe you're incorporating it, maybe you're responding

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to it and it's not exactly the same thing,

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but you, you, you, you can't ignore it.

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You can't ignore the past theory if you're trying

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to develop a new theory, right?

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It, it's maybe inherently kind of an,

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integrative, effort.

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Whereas new methods,

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are much more,

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and here kind of some of the mechanisms that we, we

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kind of speculated about, they are much more portable.

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They're portable, both within a discipline.

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You can pick them up, right?

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And apply it to a new problem, right?

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And say, I think I, not, not every problem,

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not every method's suitable for every problem,

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but you, they're pretty portable.

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They're pretty transplantable, within disciplinary

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bounds across disciplinary bounds.

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And unlike theories that when you kind of use a theory,

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you almost often change the theory or tweak the theory.

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So theories evolve an application in contrast methods

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and new methods, you really can just kind of pick 'em up

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and put 'em somewhere else and use 'em as is, right?

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They don't have to evolve, as you use them.

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Um, and so we think that this is part of the, kind

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of, you know, pathway by which new,

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new methods become more disruptive,

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being applied in these new and different realms.

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Things aren't as, simple

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as they seem.

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Uh, and, and, things don't seem as, as, as simple as,

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maybe scholars have making them, have,

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have made them out to be, for example, one of the takeaways,

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maybe novelty is not a unit dimensional thing, right?

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We can't just say,

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some work is more novel than other work,

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because then we're disregarding, the type of novelty

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that, that a work might, be, you know, presenting

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or sharing with the scientific community.

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Similarly, there's more to scientific influence

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or impact than just citation counts.

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People's work gets cited all the time.

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There's a large literature on, you know,

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why certain work gets cited.

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What is, what are kind of motivations for citing.

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And, scholars like myself,

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including me here in the science

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of science community have really been looking

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at citation counts number.

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How many times has a paper been cited?

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How many times has a scholar been cited, as indicative

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of something maybe scholarly visibility, is

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what I've called it in previous work.

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But that only gets us so far, right?

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If we don't just wanna study the amount of impact,

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and we want to look at the nature of impact

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or influence, like how is this work

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influencing the scientific community?

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Then we really need to look at citation patterns, right?

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Who's using the work and how,

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and are they using the previous work, the foundational work

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that that work drew upon?

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How are all these kind of generations of scholarship,

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working together or not?

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And those citation patterns can allow us

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to measure really cool things like what Russ and Jason did

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With the CD index.

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So it is now, now called actually the disruptive index.

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Uh, most people are calling the disruptive

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index is the exact same thing.

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Um, so I think those are maybe two critical,

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implications of the work.

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Um, and also maybe, you know, one

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of the main findings is that not all types of novelty

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alter streams of knowledge in the same way, right?

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We found that new theories tend to be more consolidating,

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whereas new methods tend to be more, more disruptive.

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Um, and so the type of novelty matters.

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We can't just me, you know, look at the extent of novelty.

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We need to look at the type of novelty.

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