Abstract
We introduce several measures of novelty for a scientific article in MEDLINE based on the temporal profiles of its assigned Medical Subject Headings (MeSH). First, temporal profiles for all MeSH terms (and pairs of MeSH terms) were characterized empirically and modelled as logistic growth curves. Second, a paper's novelty is captured by its youngest MeSH (and pairs of MeSH) as measured in years and volume of prior work. Across all papers in MEDLINE published since 1985, we find that individual concept novelty is rare (2.7% of papers have a MeSH ≤ 3 years old; 1.0% have a MeSH ≤ 20 papers old), while combinatorial novelty is the norm (68% have a pair of MeSH ≤ 3 years old; 90% have a pair of MeSH ≤ 10 papers old). Furthermore, these novelty measures exhibit complex correlations with article impact (as measured by citations received) and authors' professional age.
Original language | English (US) |
---|---|
Journal | D-Lib Magazine |
Volume | 22 |
Issue number | 9-10 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - 2016 |
Keywords
- Bibliometrics
- MEDLINE
- Novelty
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Library and Information Sciences
Fingerprint
Dive into the research topics of 'Quantifying conceptual novelty in the biomedical literature'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.Datasets
-
Conceptual novelty scores for PubMed articles
Mishra, S. (Creator) & Torvik, V. I. (Creator), University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Apr 23 2018
DOI: 10.13012/B2IDB-5060298_V1
Dataset