3 ms·

> we measure the novelty and conventionality of manuscripts by the atypicality of combinations of journals in their reference lists Kind of an odd proxy for no

• seydor 4y ago
  Switch to another metric, make a different conclusion. This is modern science where you can prove whatever you want.
  • bluenose69 4y ago
    You're right about the metric, but this paper falls into the category of information analysis, not science. As you say, the results for this kind of work usually depend on the metric, and since those metrics are at the choice of authors, the result are open to debate. I'm not saying that the results are uninteresting, only that it is risky to make strong conclusions based on them. For example, I work in a multidisciplinary field. Once I counted the citations per word of text in papers published in the separate disciplines. I found that biology-oriented research had a cite/word rate that was about 5 times that of physics-oriented research. I don't think that says anything really significant about the two fields, but it is something worth knowing, when judging tenure files.
• matusp 4y ago
  Yeah, this was my first reaction as well. It's incredibly hard to tell how much signal is in a metric like this. I can imagine two papers or two grant proposal with significantly different degrees of novelty that have the exact same references.