"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."
"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. Beginner's charm"
Teams that include high proportions of beginner authors—individuals with no prior publications—tend to produce more disruptive and innovative papers. Analysis covered over 28 million scientific articles from SciSciNet-v2 across 146 fields (1971–2021). Disruptiveness was measured by comparing a paper's citations with citations of the works it referenced, where higher scores indicate a shift away from predecessors. Beginners bring fewer constraints from accumulated knowledge, greater intellectual freedom, and less loyalty to prevailing assumptions. Integrating beginners into collaborative teams can increase the likelihood of breakthroughs and shift scientific attention toward new directions.
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