Quantifying conceptual novelty in the biomedical literature

We present several measures and methods for quantifying conceptual novelty of an article in the biomedical literature corpus using a collection of 22 million MEDLINE articles. Our results show the prevalence of combinatorial novelty in biomedical literature along with its complex correlations with the age of the author and impact as measured through citations. We make the data and source code available through a web based interface http://abel.lis.illinois.edu/gimli/P01AG0393471348742Ope