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Collaborations with a higher proportion of unpublished researchers can yield papers that present groundbreaking ideas.Credit: St\u00edgur M\u00e1r Karlsson\/Heimsmyndir via Getty<\/p>\n
What characteristics drive scientific discovery? Experience is often seen as key,<\/a> with success coming from years of knowledge building and collaboration. This is certainly true for most Nobel Prize laureates, who have an average age of 58.<\/p>\n However, research teams with high fractions of beginners \u2014 authors with no prior publication history \u2014 tend to be more disruptive and innovative, found a study posted on the preprint server arXiv on 12 September1<\/a>.<\/p>\n Actively integrating beginners into research groups could boost the disruptive and innovative qualities of the work <\/a>by having fewer collaborators who are burdened by knowledge, the authors say. \u201cBeginner scientists have less loyalty to prevailing assumptions, and they can take more intellectual freedom,\u201d says co-author Raiyan Abdul Baten, a computational social scientist at the University of South Florida in Tampa. <\/p>\n Can creativity in science be learnt? These researchers think so<\/p>\n <\/a><\/p>\n Beginner\u2019s charm<\/p>\n This pattern was first noticed by researchers during a study of whether artificial intelligence can predict how innovative and disruptive a paper will be in its scientific domain2<\/a>. In the new study, the team analysed more than 28 million articles from SciSciNet-v2, a data lake for the science of science research. These scientific papers spanned 146 fields and were published between 1971 and 2021.<\/p>\n Disruption scores were calculated by comparing how many citations a paper has garnered compared with the papers that it referenced. A disruptive paper that was cited more times than were the papers it referenced could, for example, disprove an established theory and offer an alternative hypothesis.<\/p>\n During the analysis, Baten and his colleagues noticed a link between a paper\u2019s disruptiveness and the number of beginner authors, which led them to partition data by authors\u2019 \u2018career age\u2019 \u2014 defined as the number of years since their first publication. Beginner authors were those with no prior publications.<\/p>\n They were surprised to find that papers with a higher proportion of beginner authors tended to be more disruptive than were papers with more early-career or senior authors. Disruption scores were highest when beginners made up the entire team, but they were also high when beginners were paired with co-authors with track records of producing disruptive work. Papers with the highest ratio of beginner authors consistently showed a positive correlation between disruption and citation count.<\/p>\n \u201cAs the fraction of beginners increases in teams, the disruptivity and innovation go up,\u201d says Baten. \u201cAcross team sizes, decades and disciplines, we found these results to be robust,\u201d he adds.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/d41586-025-03117-1_51486554.png\"\/)
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