The pursuit of creativity and originality in science is pivotal, as it fuels technological advancement and paves the way for a better understanding of our world. Consequently, assessing the creativity of scientific endeavors has become a crucial research target.

Recently, a research team from the School of Systems Science introduce the concept of persistent disruption. On May 20, the paper titled The critical role of persistent disruption in advancing science was published in Nature Computational Science. On the same day, the paper was reported by Science.

A screenshot of the report on the paper by Science (Click here to view)

The abstract of the paper is as follows:

Disruptive innovation is an important feature of scientific research. However, increasing evidence in recent years shows that highly disruptive papers are not necessarily milestone works in science and may even receive very few citations. To understand the mechanisms leading to such phenomena, we develop a link disruption metric that quantifies the disruptiveness of each citation link. This metric allows us to investigate disruption at both the reference and citation levels, enabling the development of a two-dimensional framework to evaluate the persistence of disruption caused by a given paper. Surprisingly, we find that papers with high reference disruption can have high citation disruption, meaning that a paper that disrupts previous papers may itself be further disrupted by its later citing papers. We find that persistently disruptive papers (disruptive papers that are not disrupted by citing papers) are more likely to be recognized as award-winning papers and receive high numbers of citations. Finally, we find that papers of larger teams and papers in recent years, though found to have weaker disruption, are more likely to have stronger persistent disruption once they disrupt previous papers.

Full text link: https://www.nature.com/articles/s43588-025-00808-7