Collaborations with a higher proportion of unpublished researchers can yield papers that present groundbreaking ideas.Credit: Stígur Már Karlsson/Heimsmyndir via Getty
What characteristics drive scientific discovery? Experience is often seen as key, with success coming from years of knowledge building and collaboration. This is certainly true for most Nobel Prize laureates, who have an average age of 58.
However, research teams with high fractions of beginners — authors with no prior publication history — tend to be more disruptive and innovative, found a study posted on the preprint server arXiv on 12 September1.
Actively integrating beginners into research groups could boost the disruptive and innovative qualities of the work by having fewer collaborators who are burdened by knowledge, the authors say. “Beginner scientists have less loyalty to prevailing assumptions, and they can take more intellectual freedom,” says co-author Raiyan Abdul Baten, a computational social scientist at the University of South Florida in Tampa.
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Beginner’s charm
This pattern was first noticed by researchers during a study of whether artificial intelligence can predict how innovative and disruptive a paper will be in its scientific domain2. In the new study, the team analysed more than 28 million articles from SciSciNet-v2, a data lake for the science of science research. These scientific papers spanned 146 fields and were published between 1971 and 2021.
Disruption scores were calculated by comparing how many citations a paper has garnered compared with the papers that it referenced. A disruptive paper that was cited more times than were the papers it referenced could, for example, disprove an established theory and offer an alternative hypothesis.
During the analysis, Baten and his colleagues noticed a link between a paper’s disruptiveness and the number of beginner authors, which led them to partition data by authors’ ‘career age’ — defined as the number of years since their first publication. Beginner authors were those with no prior publications.
They were surprised to find that papers with a higher proportion of beginner authors tended to be more disruptive than were papers with more early-career or senior authors. Disruption scores were highest when beginners made up the entire team, but they were also high when beginners were paired with co-authors with track records of producing disruptive work. Papers with the highest ratio of beginner authors consistently showed a positive correlation between disruption and citation count.
“As the fraction of beginners increases in teams, the disruptivity and innovation go up,” says Baten. “Across team sizes, decades and disciplines, we found these results to be robust,” he adds.
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Why do collaborations with more beginners tend to be more disruptive? The researchers speculate that these scientists offer new perspectives because they are less attached to previous theories and knowledge than are their more experienced colleagues. “Sometimes, it is difficult to unlearn the prevailing assumptions then adopt radically new ones,” says Baten. This could allow early-career scientists to be more receptive to new ideas and more likely to take risks by exploring experimental approaches, he says.
