[Paper Review] Pandemics are catalysts of scientific novelty: Evidence from COVID-19

Meijun Liu, Yi Bu+15 more|PubMed|Sep 26, 2020

scientometrics and bibliometrics research18 references9 citations

TL;DR

This study analyzes 98,981 COVID-19 research papers using BioBERT to measure scientific novelty, finding that first-time collaborations significantly increased novelty post-outbreak, while international collaboration—though temporarily reduced—did not hinder novelty and instead contributed to innovative research. The results suggest pandemics catalyze scientific innovation through expanded, diverse collaborations beyond national boundaries.

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.

Motivation & Objective

• To investigate how pandemics influence scientific novelty in research output.
• To examine the role of first-time collaborations in driving innovation during the COVID-19 pandemic.
• To assess whether international collaboration enhances or hinders scientific novelty during global health crises.
• To evaluate the impact of team composition and collaboration patterns on the originality of scientific findings.
• To provide evidence-based recommendations for fostering global scientific collaboration during future pandemics.

Proposed method

• The study analyzed 98,981 coronavirus-related research papers from PubMed using the BioBERT model, pre-trained on 29 million PubMed articles, to quantify scientific novelty.
• Novelty was measured by the semantic uniqueness of paper abstracts, with higher scores indicating greater departure from existing knowledge.
• First-time collaboration was identified by analyzing co-authorship networks to detect new co-author pairs not previously linked.
• International collaboration was assessed by tracking cross-national co-authorship patterns before and after the pandemic onset.
• Statistical models were used to correlate collaboration types (first-time, international) with novelty scores, controlling for publication year and journal.
• The analysis compared collaboration trends and novelty levels during the pandemic (2020) versus pre-pandemic periods (2015–2019).

Experimental results

Research questions

• RQ1 How did scientific novelty in coronavirus research evolve during the early phase of the COVID-19 pandemic?
• RQ2 To what extent do first-time collaborations contribute to increased scientific novelty in pandemic-related research?
• RQ3 Did international collaboration negatively affect scientific novelty during the pandemic, as observed in pre-pandemic periods?
• RQ4 What is the relationship between team diversity in co-authorship and the originality of scientific outputs during global health emergencies?
• RQ5 How do collaboration patterns differ in pandemic versus non-pandemic research contexts in terms of novelty generation?

Key findings

• First-time collaborations increased significantly after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, indicating a broader expansion of research networks.
• Papers involving first-time co-authors exhibited higher novelty scores, suggesting that new team formations enhance creative output.
• International collaboration declined abruptly at the start of the pandemic but did not reduce scientific novelty, contradicting pre-pandemic trends.
• The absence of a novelty penalty in international collaborations during the pandemic implies that global cooperation remains valuable for innovation under crisis conditions.
• Scientific novelty, as measured by BioBERT, rose substantially during the pandemic, particularly in papers with diverse and newly formed teams.
• The findings support the hypothesis that pandemics act as catalysts for scientific novelty by enabling access to distant, previously unconnected research resources through novel collaborations.