Fresh Eyes in Research: How Beginner Scientists Drive Innovation
A recent study suggests that including beginner scientists in research teams can significantly boost the disruptive and innovative potential of their work. Researchers analyzed over 28 million articles from the SciSciNet-v2 database, spanning 146 fields and published between 1971 and 2021, to investigate this connection.1
The study, initially sparked by research into whether artificial intelligence could predict paper innovation,2 defined “beginner” authors as those with no prior publications and measured a paper’s “disruptiveness” by comparing its citation count to the papers it referenced. A paper demonstrating higher citation rates than its references was considered disruptive, perhaps indicating a challenge to established theories or the introduction of novel hypotheses.
The analysis revealed a clear correlation: papers with a higher proportion of beginner authors tended to be more disruptive. The highest disruption scores were observed when teams consisted entirely of beginner scientists, but strong results also emerged when beginners collaborated with established researchers known for disruptive work. A consistent positive relationship was found between the ratio of beginner authors and both disruption and citation count.
“As the fraction of beginners increases in teams,the disruptivity and innovation go up,” explains Raiyan Abdul Baten,a computational social scientist at the University of South Florida in tampa and co-author of the study. These findings proved robust across varying team sizes, decades, and scientific disciplines.
Researchers hypothesize that this effect stems from beginner scientists’ relative lack of ingrained assumptions and greater openness to new ideas. “Sometimes, it is indeed arduous to unlearn the prevailing assumptions than adopt radically new ones,” baten notes, suggesting that early-career scientists might potentially be more willing to explore unconventional approaches and take intellectual risks.
References:
1 https://www.nature.com/articles/530255a
2 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-01913-3
