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Combination of research questions and methods: A new measurement of scientific novelty

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  • Luo, Zhuoran
  • Lu, Wei
  • He, Jiangen
  • Wang, Yuqi

Abstract

As critical building blocks of scientific research, research questions and research methods are put forward to reveal the nature of a publication's scientific novelty. Although existing studies have examined scientific novelty from multiple combination-based views, the temporal and semantic complexity of research questions and methods remains to be fully addressed. To remedy this, we introduce a new approach to measuring the novelty of papers from the perspective of question-method combination. Specifically, we demonstrated a life-index novelty measurement based on the frequency and age of question terms and method terms. Furthermore, by using deep learning and representation learning techniques, we proposed a semantic novelty measurement algorithm based on the semantic similarity of terms. By using the dataset of papers collected from ACM Digital Library for evaluation, the effectiveness of our methods was evaluated by case studies and statistical analysis. Our work innovatively integrates the age, frequency, and semantics of research methods and research questions that characterizes novelty in scientific publications.

Suggested Citation

  • Luo, Zhuoran & Lu, Wei & He, Jiangen & Wang, Yuqi, 2022. "Combination of research questions and methods: A new measurement of scientific novelty," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 16(2).
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:infome:v:16:y:2022:i:2:s1751157722000347
    DOI: 10.1016/j.joi.2022.101282
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    Cited by:

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    2. Sam Arts & Nicola Melluso & Reinhilde Veugelers, 2023. "Beyond Citations: Measuring Novel Scientific Ideas and their Impact in Publication Text," Papers 2309.16437, arXiv.org, revised Oct 2024.
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    4. Yingyi Zhang & Chengzhi Zhang, 2024. "Extracting problem and method sentence from scientific papers: a context-enhanced transformer using formulaic expression desensitization," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 129(6), pages 3433-3468, June.

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