| Abstract: |
Though Science is traditionally associated with creative behavior, concerns
have been raised on its professional procedures being suÿciently open to
innovative re-search. Thanks to a new measurement of novelty based on the
frequencies of pair-wise combinations of article keywords calculated on the
set of all research articles published from 1999 to 2013 in the journals
referenced by the WoS (more than ten million papers), we find no evidence of
shrinking novelty in science over that pe-riod. Novel contributions are more
often performed in larger teams that span more institutional boundaries and
geographic areas. High novelty increases citations by more than forty percent
and the odds of a “big hit” by about fifty percent. High novelty
simultaneously reduces citational risk conditioned on being published to a
large extent because it rises the odds of the problem remaining active in the
future. As we document that novel papers match preferentially with top
journals (even controlling for journal quality), the risk induced by novel
research is more likely to materialize through the publication process. |