Quantifying simultaneous innovations in evolutionary medicine
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ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Quantifying simultaneous innovations in evolutionary medicine Deryc T. Painter1 · Frank van der Wouden2 · Manfred D. Laubichler1,3 · Hyejin Youn4,5,6 Received: 6 October 2020 / Accepted: 13 November 2020 / Published online: 25 November 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
Abstract 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. Keywords Simultaneous innovation · Independence · Novelty · Keyword extraction · Evolutionary medicine
Introduction Innovations provide a wide range of benefits to society and are seen as the key drivers of progress. All throughout modern history, innovations are often contributed to the merits and relentless hard work of individuals, thus receiving credit for the work (Cyranoski et al. 2011; Fiske 2011; Larson et al. 2014; * Manfred D. Laubichler [email protected] * Hyejin Youn [email protected] Deryc T. Painter [email protected] Frank van der Wouden [email protected] 1
School of Complex Adaptive System, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ 85281, USA
2
Department of Geography, University of Hong Kong, Pok Fu Lam, Hong Kong
3
Santa Fe Institute, Santa Fe, NM 87501, USA
4
Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL 60208, USA
5
Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems, Evanston, IL 60208, USA
6
London Mathematical Lab, London, WC2N 6DF, UK
Turk-Bicakci et al. 2014). However, identifying pioneering work and assigning the appropriate credits to the corresponding scholars has not been straightforward in history. Famously, Thomas Kuhn, before publishing his work on scientific paradigms (Kuhn 1962), worked on the issue of simultaneous discovery using the formulation of the principle of energy conservation as an example (Kuhn 1959). One of the most famous examples is the anecdote of Alexander Graham Bell who filed his patent on telephone just before Elisha Gray (Hounshell 1975; Evenson 2015) is now being contested by the revelation of Antonio Meucci’s “speaki
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