Page - (000269) - in Knowledge and Networks

265 and challenging scientists’ capacity to comprehend new thinking across domains. The finding that teams preserve high conventionality yet introduce tail novelty sug- gests that teams help meet the challenge of the burden of knowledge by balancing domain-level depth with a capacity for atypical combinations. Our methodology considered paper and journal pairings but can be applied at the level of disciplines, papers, or topics within papers, allowing the examination of combinations of prior work at different resolutions in future studies of creativity and scientific impact. Beyond science, links between novelty and conventionality in successful innovation also appear. E-books retain page-flipping graphics to remind the reader of physical books, and blue jeans were designed with a familiar watch pocket to look like conventional trousers. From this viewpoint, the balance between extending technology with atypical combinations of prior ideas while embedding them in conventional knowledge frames may be critical to human progress in many domains. Future research questions also arise from our findings. Science is dynamic, with research areas shifting and new fields arising. While we find that the regulari- ties relating novelty, conventionality, and impact persist across time and fields, understanding how research trajectories shift and how new fields are born are ques- tions that measures of novelty and convention may valuably inform. At root, our work suggests that creativity in science appears to be a nearly universal phenome- non of two extremes. At one extreme is conventionality, and at the other is novelty. Curiously, notable advances in science appear most closely linked not with efforts along one boundary or the other but with efforts that reach toward both frontiers. Acknowledgements Sponsored by the Northwestern University Institute on Complex Systems (NICO), by the Army Research Laboratory under Cooperative Agreement Number W911NF-09-2-0053 and DARPA BAA-11-64, Social Media in Strategic Communication. The views and conclusions contained in this document are those of the authors and should not be inter- preted as representing the official policies, either expressed or implied, of the Army Research Laboratory or the U.S. Government. 11B. References Azoulay, P., Zivin, J. G., & Manso, G. (2011). Incentives and creativity: evidence from the Academic Life Science. Howard Hughes Medical Investigator Program. The RAND Journal of Economics, 42, 527–554. doi:10.1111/j.1756-2171.2011.00140.x Becker, H. S. (1982). Art Worlds. Berkeley: University of California Press. Bollen, J., Rodriguez, M. A., & van de Sompel, H. (2006). Journal status. Scientometrics, 69, 669–687. doi:10.1007/s11192-006-0176-z Collins, R. (1998). The sociology of philosophies: A global theory of intellectual change. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Einstein, A. (1949). The world as I see it. Secaucus: Citadel Press. Evans, J., & Foster, J. (2011). Metaknowledge. Science, 331, 721–725. doi:10.1126/ science.1201765 12 How Atypical Combinations of Scientific Ideas Are Related to Impact:…