The Right Job and the Job Right: Novelty, Impact and Journal Stratification in Science

Abstract

Though Science is traditionally associated with creative behavior, concerns have been raised on its professional procedures being sufficiently open to innovative research. Thanks to a new measurement of novelty based on the frequencies of pairwise 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 period. 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.

Keywords: Novelty, Web of Science, Scientific Creativity, Journal Stratification, Science

JEL Classification: O31, C78