Title
Pandemics are catalysts of scientific novelty: Evidence from COVID-19
Abstract
Scientific novelty drives the efforts to invent new vaccines and solutions during the pandemic. First-time collaboration and international collaboration are two pivotal channels to expand teams' search activities for a broader scope of resources required to address the global challenge, which might facilitate the generation of novel ideas. Our analysis of 98,981 coronavirus papers suggests that scientific novelty measured by the BioBERT model that is pretrained on 29 million PubMed articles, and first-time collaboration increased after the outbreak of COVID-19, and international collaboration witnessed a sudden decrease. During COVID-19, papers with more first-time collaboration were found to be more novel and international collaboration did not hamper novelty as it had done in the normal periods. The findings suggest the necessity of reaching out for distant resources and the importance of maintaining a collaborative scientific community beyond nationalism during a pandemic.
Year
DOI
Venue
2022
10.1002/asi.24612
JOURNAL OF THE ASSOCIATION FOR INFORMATION SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY
DocType
Volume
Issue
Journal
73
8
ISSN
Citations 
PageRank 
2330-1635
1
0.35
References 
Authors
0
17
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Meijun Liu1114.51
Yi Bu2104.14
Chongyan Chen310.35
Jian Xu417824.70
Daifeng Li512710.74
Yan Leng610.35
Richard B. Freeman734.30
Eric T Meyer810.35
Wonjin Yoon942.11
Mujeen Sung1042.11
Minbyul Jeong1142.11
Jinhyuk Lee12997.95
Jaewoo Kang131258179.45
Chao Min14224.41
Min Song1513025.52
Ying Ding162396144.65
Ying Ding172396144.65