Alexander M. Petersen, Felber Arroyave, Fabio Pammolli
arXiv 21 Jun 2024 · cs.DL · 5 citations (OpenAlex)
arXiv:2406.15311 · PDF · DOI · OpenAlex · Extracted main text
Measuring the rate of innovation in academia and industry is fundamental to monitoring the efficiency and competitiveness of the knowledge economy. To this end, a disruption index (CD) was recently developed and applied to publication and patent citation networks (Wu et al., Nature 2019; Park et al., Nature 2023). Here we show that CD systematically decreases over time due to secular growth in research and patent production, following two distinct mechanisms unrelated to innovation -- one behavioral and the other structural. Whereas the behavioral explanation reflects shifts associated with techno-social factors (e.g. self-citation practices), the structural explanation follows from `citation inflation' (CI), an inextricable feature of real citation networks attributable to increasing reference list lengths, which causes CD to systematically decrease. We demonstrate this causal link by way of mathematical deduction, computational simulation, multi-variate regression, and quasi-experimental comparison of the disruptiveness of PNAS versus PNAS Plus articles, which differ only in their lengths. Accordingly, we analyze CD data available in the SciSciNet database and find that disruptiveness incrementally increased from 2005-2015, and that the negative relationship between disruption and team-size is remarkably small in overall magnitude effect size, and shifts from negative to positive for team size $\geq$ 8 coauthors.
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The works this paper leans on most, across its whole bibliography — not restricted to papers in our corpus. Ranked by composite intensity, which combines how often a work is mentioned, how many sections mention it, and how much of that falls in the main text rather than the appendix.
| Reference | Intensity | Mentions | Sections | Main text | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Park M, Leahey E, Funk RJ (2023) (2023) Papers and patents are becoming less disruptive over time | 1.000 | 25 | 4 | 100% |
| 2 | Petersen AM, Arroyave F, Pammolli F (2023) (2023) The disruption index is biased by citation inflation | 1.000 | 20 | 5 | 100% |
| 3 | Wu L, Wang D, Evans JA (2019) (2019) Large teams develop and small teams disrupt science and technology | 1.000 | 13 | 5 | 100% |
| 4 | Pan RK, Petersen AM, Pammolli F, Fortunato S (2018) (2018) The memory of science: Inflation, myopia, and the knowledge network | 1.000 | 11 | 5 | 100% |
| 5 | Holst V, Algaba A, Tori F, Wenmackers S, Ginis V (2024) (2024) Dataset artefacts are the hidden drivers of the declining disruptiveness in science | 1.000 | 10 | 5 | 100% |
| 6 | Macher JT, Rutzer C, Weder R (2024) (2024) Is there a secular decline in disruptive patents? Correcting for measurement bias | 1.000 | 8 | 5 | 100% |
| 7 | Lin Y, Frey CB, Wu L (2023) (2023) Remote collaboration fuses fewer breakthrough ideas | 1.000 | 6 | 4 | 100% |
| 8 | Bentley RA, et al (2023) (2023) Is disruption decreasing, or is it accelerating? | 0.928 | 4 | 3 | 100% |
| 9 | Lin Z, Yin Y, Liu L, Wang D (2023) (2023) SciSciNet: A large-scale open data lake for the science of science research | 0.874 | 8 | 2 | 100% |
| 10 | Schekman R (2010) (2010) Creating a new option for online-only research articles: PNAS Plus | 0.843 | 3 | 3 | 100% |
Showing the top 10 of 35 scored citations.