Novelty in Science

Trabajo presentado a la Science, Technology and Innovation indicators (STI) Conference, celebrada en Paris (Francia) del 6 al 8 de septiembre de 2017.In this article we propose a new measurement of novelty in science based on the frequencies of pairwise combinations of articles keywords. We argue that this approach more accurately grasps "thematic novelty", that is the exploration of new research questions, as compared to journal reference atypicality. Our empirical evidence is based on more than ten million research articles published in the journals references in the WoS from 1999 to 2013, for which we have very complete; and detailed data. We show that the number of distinct keyword combinations follows a very similar growth pattern as the number of research articles (equal constant growth rates). At the article level, novelty is shown to be stable over the whole period. Novelty is found to increase with the number of authors, the number of institutions involved, and the geographical span of the teams, across all fields of science and within each broad field. Further, novelty is strongly and positively related to; the citation impact. Finally, we show that top-impact journals play an exceptionally significant role in bringing novelty into the system of science.Peer reviewe