Identifying Transformative Scientific Research

Transformative research refers to research that shifts or disrupts established scientific paradigms. Notable examples include the discovery of high-temperature superconductivity that disrupted the theory established 30 years ago. Identifying potential transformative research early and accurately is important for funding agencies to maximize the impact of their investments. It also helps scientists identify and focus their attention on promising emerging works. This paper presents a data driven approach where citation patterns of scientific papers are analyzed to quantify how much a potential challenger idea shifts an established paradigm. The key idea is that transformative research creates an observable disruption in the structure of "information cascades," chains of references that can be traced back to the papers establishing some scientific paradigm. Such a disruption is visible soon after the challenger's introduction. We define a disruption score to quantify the disruption and develop an algorithm to compute it from a large citation network. Experimental results show that our approach can successfully identify transformative scientific papers that disrupt established paradigms in Physics and Computer Science, regardless of whether the challenger paradigm is an instant hit or a classic whose contribution is formally recognized with a Nobel Prize decades later.