Innovative research is essential to the development of new treatments, says Philipp Koellinger, who explains how his company’s novelty scores feature comparing 250 million articles could impact the pharmaceutical sector.
Novelty scores are a mathematical measure of how surprising a scientific study is. Currently, the novelty scores look at two different things: content novelty and context novelty.
Content novelty examines a manuscript’s combination of keywords, topics or concepts and compares them to previously published work. If the combination of keywords and topics are already frequently observed across science, a low content novelty score reflects this, representing marginal progress or consolidation of knowledge in a well-defined field or topic.
High content novelty scores flag articles that combine topics and concepts in unexpected ways.
Really surprising research is more likely to make a difference, but it also has a higher chance of being wrong. The old saying “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” often applies to research with high content novelty scores.
The most meaningful breakthroughs often happen at the intersections of very different fields… Surprising research is more likely to make a difference, reflected in a higher correlation between novelty scores and future citations
Context novelty scores are a mathematical measure of how surprising the combination of cited background literature is: are the authors making connections between different fields of literature not previously made, combining various disciplines and approaches that nobody has thought about before?
The most meaningful breakthroughs often happen at the intersections of very different fields.
Surprising research is more likely to make a difference, reflected in a higher correlation between novelty scores and future citations [1].
However, it too has a higher chance of being wrong. Once again, the old saying applies.
Practical benefits
Novelty scores make it much easier and quicker to filter and find research that is surprising – and, therefore, more likely to make a difference. The traditional peer review process of many journals often puts a high premium on articles that are viewed as novel or surprising. However, the traditional peer review process is not only frustratingly slow, it’s also highly subjective and prone to biases. Now there is an objective measure of novelty available immediately when the research is first shared publicly – even if “only” on a preprint server.
Perhaps novelty scores can play a role in encouraging scientists to take higher risks in the research questions they tackle, to think outside the box, and do unusual things that can lead to breakthroughs.
These are a quick, effective way for researchers, pharmaceutical companies and investors to find the most surprising, new research results. Thousands of medical research articles are published every week – it’s almost impossible for anyone to stay on top of what’s new and relevant. In that sense, novelty scores can help to save time and money, and potentially unlock new opportunities that would have been missed or spotted too late. High-impact journals typically play the role of picking the most promising, novel research. However, extensive empirical evidence shows they are not particularly good at that task. Novelty scores are an alternative, quicker and more objective way to identify surprising research.
Pharma application
Measuring surprise objectively allows companies to quickly discover the most novel research around the most pressing diseases and conditions that require treatment.
For example, pharmaceutical companies can look for novel findings that are relevant to the treatment of cardiovascular conditions, cancer, chronic illnesses and other conditions.
Of course, novelty is nothing without rigour and replicability. Just because a study reports surprising, promising results, it does not mean those results are true. Pharma companies and researchers in the life sciences are all too familiar with the frustration of being unable to replicate some results. Much time and money has been wasted on research agendas and drug development projects based on scientific studies that turned out to be false. Ideally, highly promising research results should be independently replicated much more frequently – before lots of time and money is spent on follow-up work that just assumes those results were correct. Real scientific progress happens when novelty, rigour and replicability coincide.
That’s why we will launch a crowdfunding mechanism for replication studies on DeSci Publish early next year. This will allow the scientific community and R&D-intensive companies to identify the studies they think should be replicated and provide researchers in the field with the funding required for carrying out those replications.
I invite anyone to explore our novelty scores by visiting desci.com to experiment with the fields that interest.
Philipp Koellinger is co-founder and CEO of DeSci Labs
References: 1. https://desci.com/blog/why-noveltyscores-for-scienceare-a-game-changer
DeSci Labs was joint winner in the Best Automation & Data Innovation category at the recent 2024 Lab Awards, organised jointly by Lab Innovations and Laboratory News and presented during the annual Lab Innovations Show.
Judges cited the company’s deployment of Web3 technology to build a peer-topeer open science publishing infrastructure, adding “this platform increases efficiency, reduces duplication of effort, and allows scientists to access material without paywalls, addressing key issues in modern scientific publishing”.
Sadie Zellem from Syensqo was co-winner of the award in recognition of her firm’s work in LIMS implementation for data management and efficiency.
