Page - (000258) - in Knowledge and Networks

254 0.10 0.08 0.06 0.04 0.02 0.00 High TailNovelty Low TailNovelty Low M edian Conve ntion High M edian Conven tion H it pa pe r pr ob ab ili ty Fig. 12.5 The probability of a “hit” paper conditional on novelty and conventionality. Figure 12.5 presents the probability of a paper being in the top 5 % of the citation distribution, conditional on two dimensions: whether a paper exhibits (1) high or low median conventionality and (2) high or low tail novelty, as defined in the text. Papers that combine high median conventionality and high tail novelty are hits in 9.11 out of 100 papers, a rate nearly double the background rate of 5 %. Papers that are high on one dimension only—high median conventionality or high tail novelty but not both—have hit rates about half as large. Papers with low median conventionality and low tail novelty have hit rates of only 2.05 out of 100 papers. The sample includes all papers published in the WOS from 1990 to 2000. Figure 12.6 shows similar findings when considering (i) all other decades from 1950 to 2000; (ii) “hit” papers defined as the top 1 % or 10 % by citations, hinting at a universality of these relationships for scientific work. The difference in the hit probabilities for each category is statisti- cally significant (p < 0.00001). The percentage of WOS papers in each category are; Green Bar (6.7 %), Gold Bar (23 %), Red Bar (26 %), and Blue Bar (44 %). From Uzzi et al. (2013a, p. 470). Copyright 2013 by Science. Reprinted with permission from the authors and Science elty disappears. These patterns suggest that the concept of tail novelty is not sensi- tive to a single value and that beyond a precise focus on the 10th percentile the construct is related to impact so long as one continues to consider the left tail of the distribution. Results by Subfields The following analysis shows that the results presented in the main text for the whole of the WOS continued to appear quite broadly when examining patterns within individual subfields. By subfield, we presented (1) the tendency for tail nov- elty and median conventionality, and (2) the relationship between novelty, conven- tionality, and hit papers. We examined all 243 subfields that appeared in the WOS over the 1990s. S. Mukherjee et al.