A Content-Based Novelty Measure for Scholarly Publications: A Proof of Concept

Novelty, akin to gene mutation in evolution, opens possibilities for scientific advancement. Despite peer review being the gold standard for evaluating novelty in scholarly communication and resource allocation, the vast volume of submissions necessitates an automated measure of scientific novelty. Adopting a perspective that views novelty as the atypical combination of existing knowledge, we introduce an information-theoretic measure of novelty in scholarly publications. This measure is quantified by the degree of `surprise' perceived by a language model that represents the distribution of scientific discourse. The proposed measure is accompanied by face and construct validity evidence; the former demonstrates correspondence to scientific common sense, and the latter is endorsed through alignments with novelty evaluations from a select panel of domain experts. Additionally, characterized by its interpretability, fine granularity, and accessibility, this measure addresses gaps prevalent in existing methods. We believe this measure holds great potential to benefit editors, stakeholders, and policymakers, and it provides a confident lens for examining the relationship between novelty and scientific dynamics such as creativity, interdisciplinarity, scientific advances, and more.