The DOI matches its Crossref record; 25 of the 25 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
Atypical Combinations and Scientific Impact
Abstract
Making an Impact: How big a role do unconventional combinations of existing knowledge play in the impact of a scientific paper? To examine this question, Uzzi et al. (p. 468 ) studied 17.9 million research articles across five decades of the Web of Science, the largest repository of scientific research. Scientific work typically appeared to draw on highly conventional, familiar mixtures of knowledge. The highest-impact papers were not the ones that had the greatest novelty, but had a combination of novelty and otherwise conventional combinations of prior work.
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cites
Henderson, R. M., & Clark, K. B. (1990) · Administrative Science Quarterly · doi:10.2307/2393549 · Cited by 8,357
Co‐citation in the scientific literature: A new measure of the relationship between two documents
Small, H. (1973) · Journal of the American Society for Information Science · doi:10.1002/asi.4630240406 · Cited by 5,345
The Increasing Dominance of Teams in Production of Knowledge
Wuchty, S., Jones, B. F., & Uzzi, B. (2007) · Science · doi:10.1126/science.1136099 · Cited by 3,615
Self-citationRecombinant Uncertainty in Technological Search
Fleming, L. (2001) · Management Science · doi:10.1287/mnsc.47.1.117.10671 · Cited by 2,873
Collaboration and Creativity: The Small World Problem
Uzzi, B., & Spiro, J. (2005) · American Journal of Sociology · doi:10.1086/432782 · Cited by 1,885 · cited 3×
“Combinations of existing material are centerpieces in theories of creativity, whether in the arts, the sciences, or commercial innovation (2-4, 6-10, 16).”
BackgroundSelf-citationThe sociology of philosophies: a global theory of intellectual change
(1999) · Choice Reviews Online · doi:10.5860/choice.36-5015 · Cited by 1,292
Team Assembly Mechanisms Determine Collaboration Network Structure and Team Performance
Guimerà, R., Uzzi, B., Spiro, J., & Amaral, L. A. N. (2005) · Science · doi:10.1126/science.1106340 · Cited by 1,126
Self-citationThe Burden of Knowledge and the “Death of the Renaissance Man”: Is Innovation Getting Harder?
JONES, B. F. (2009) · Review of Economic Studies · doi:10.1111/j.1467-937x.2008.00531.x · Cited by 1,058
Self-citationWeitzman, M. L. (1998) · The Quarterly Journal of Economics · doi:10.1162/003355398555595 · Cited by 979
Multi-University Research Teams: Shifting Impact, Geography, and Stratification in Science
Jones, B. F., Wuchty, S., & Uzzi, B. (2008) · Science · doi:10.1126/science.1158357 · Cited by 812
Self-citation
Cited by
Fortunato, S., Bergstrom, C. T., Börner, K., Evans, J. A., Helbing, D., Milojević, S., Petersen, A. M., Radicchi, F., Sinatra, R., Uzzi, B., et al. (2018) · Science · doi:10.1126/science.aao0185 · Cited by 1,497
“the context of established knowledge (26).”
InfluentialSelf-citationPapers and patents are becoming less disruptive over time
Park, M., Leahey, E., & Funk, R. J. (2023) · Nature · doi:10.1038/s41586-022-05543-x · Cited by 899
Interdisciplinary research has consistently lower funding success
Bromham, L., Dinnage, R., & Hua, X. (2016) · Nature · doi:10.1038/nature18315 · Cited by 594
Yegros-Yegros, A., Rafols, I., & D’Este, P. (2015) · PLOS ONE · doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0135095 · Cited by 342
Computational Social Science and Sociology
Edelmann, A., Wolff, T., Montagne, D., & Bail, C. A. (2020) · Annual Review of Sociology · doi:10.1146/annurev-soc-121919-054621 · Cited by 305
Metadata
- Authors
- Uzzi, B., Mukherjee, S., Stringer, M., & Jones, B.
- Venue
- Science
- Published
- 2013-10-25
- Volume
- 342
- Issue
- 6157
- Pages
- 468-472
- ISSN
- 0036-8075 (ISSN-L)
- 1095-9203
- OpenAlex
- W2066752129
- Cited by
- 1,457
- References
- 25
- FWCI
- 53.42
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
How to cite
Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
- This page
- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Atypical Combinations and Scientific Impact. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1126/science.1240474
- The paper
- Uzzi, B., Mukherjee, S., Stringer, M., & Jones, B. (2013). Atypical Combinations and Scientific Impact. Science. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1240474
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
