Tales of Serendipity in Highly Cited Research: an Explorative Study
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Tales of Serendipity in Highly Cited Research: an Explorative Study Carter Bloch 1
& Mads
P. Sørensen 1 & Mitchell Young 2
Received: 30 September 2018 / Accepted: 17 November 2019/ # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2019
Abstract Research and innovation are attributed a growing role in maintaining global competitiveness; in particular, research advances are seen as important catalysts for innovation and growth. However, our understanding is still limited concerning how important research results are achieved. This is particularly the case for the role of serendipity, where discoveries or the path towards them are unexpected. This paper explores through the use of a narrative approach the role of planned and unplanned factors and presents elements for understanding how and when serendipity occurs in highly cited research. In this explorative study, we have interviewed 12 first authors, each of whom has played a key role in a highly cited piece of research. Their own perceptions of how research progressed, key turning points, and conditions for the research are important in illustrating what motivates and influences the researchers’ pursuit of new discoveries. The narrative approach, by introducing a temporal element, is both able to characterize the stories behind the advances, including key turning points in achieving research accomplishments, and to analyze cross-cutting themes related to researcher behavior and environment for the research. Keywords Highly cited research . Serendipity . Narratives . Research climate . Academic
freedom
Introduction Research and innovation have been attributed a growing role in maintaining global competitiveness and socio-economic progress; in particular, major research advances
* Carter Bloch [email protected]
1
Danish Centre for Studies in Research and Research Policy (CFA), Department of Political Science, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark
2
Department of European Studies, Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic
Journal of the Knowledge Economy
are seen as important catalysts for innovation and growth. This has heightened focus on monitoring scientific excellence and how it can be fostered (OECD, 2014; Sørensen et al., 2016; Young, 2015). While there clearly is a renewed interest in scientific advances, studies of science have long been concerned with new discoveries, how they occur, and their impacts. For example, the pursuit of new discoveries was a focal point in much work on the sociology of science in the 1950s and 1960s by Robert K. Merton and others1. Merton (1957) argued that the main driver of research advances is priority of discovery and the recognition of the scientific community as being first to create an advance, while Hagstrom (1965) emphasized the intrinsic satisfaction of making a discovery. Merton and Barber (2004) review a number of personal accounts and opinions by researchers that emphasize the unanticipated nature of many advances, arguing that deliberate and planned research may oversee important discover
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