Quantifying simultaneous innovations in evolutionary medicine

Autor: Manfred Dietrich Laubichler, Hyejin Youn, Frank van der Wouden, Deryc T. Painter
Jazyk: angličtina
Rok vydání: 2020
Předmět:
Zdroj: Painter, D T, van der Wouden, F, Laubichler, M D & Youn, H 2020, ' Quantifying simultaneous innovations in evolutionary medicine ', Theory in Biosciences, vol. 139, no. 4, pp. 319-335 . https://doi.org/10.1007/s12064-020-00333-3
Theory in Biosciences
Popis: To what extent do simultaneous innovations occur and are independently from each other? In this paper we use a novel persistent keyword framework to systematically identify innovations in a large corpus containing academic papers in evolutionary medicine between 2007 and 2011. We examine whether innovative papers occurring simultaneously are independent from each other by evaluating the citation and co-authorship information gathered from the corpus metadata. We find that 19 out of 22 simultaneous innovative papers do, in fact, occur independently from each other. In particular, co-authors of simultaneous innovative papers are no more geographically concentrated than the co-authors of similar non-innovative papers in the field. Our result suggests producing innovative work draws from a collective knowledge pool, rather than from knowledge circulating in distinct localized collaboration networks. Therefore, new ideas can appear at multiple locations and with geographically dispersed co-authorship networks. Our findings support the perspective that simultaneous innovations are the outcome of collective behavior.
Databáze: OpenAIRE