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The critical role of persistent disruption in advancing science

Abstract

Disruptive innovation is an important feature of scientific research. However, increasing evidence in recent years shows that highly disruptive papers are not necessarily milestone works in science and may even receive very few citations. To understand the mechanisms leading to such phenomena, we develop a link disruption metric that quantifies the disruptiveness of each citation link. This metric allows us to investigate disruption at both the reference and citation levels, enabling the development of a two-dimensional framework to evaluate the persistence of disruption caused by a given paper. Surprisingly, we find that papers with high reference disruption can have high citation disruption, meaning that a paper that disrupts previous papers may itself be further disrupted by its later citing papers. We find that persistently disruptive papers (disruptive papers that are not disrupted by citing papers) are more likely to be recognized as award-winning papers and receive high numbers of citations. Finally, we find that papers of larger teams and papers in recent years, though found to have weaker disruption, are more likely to have stronger persistent disruption once they disrupt previous papers.

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Fig. 1: Visual representation and statistical properties of reference disruption and citation disruption.
Fig. 2: Reference disruption and citation disruption for Nobel Prize-winning papers.
Fig. 3: C10 and D10 of papers in the reference–citation disruption space.
Fig. 4: Demonstrating the impact of scientists through reference–citation disruption analysis.
Fig. 5: Persistent disruption of different-sized teams and in different years.
Fig. 6: Impact of persistently disruptive papers in different disciplines.

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Data availability

The data used in this paper are publicly accessible. The SciSciNet data can be downloaded via https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.c.6076908.v1 (ref. 39). The APS data can be downloaded via https://journals.aps.org/datasets. Source data are provided with this paper.

Code availability

Open-source code related to this study is available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15227397 (ref. 40).

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Acknowledgements

This work is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under grant 72274020, and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities, grant 2233200016. This work was also supported by the European Union under the Horizon 520 Europe grant OMINO (grant 101086321).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Systems Science, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China

    Nan Deng, Xifeng Gu, Ying Fan & An Zeng

  2. Department of Physics, Bar-Ilan University, Ramat-Gan, Israel

    Shlomo Havlin

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  1. Nan Deng
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  2. Xifeng Gu
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  3. Ying Fan
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  4. Shlomo Havlin
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  5. An Zeng
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Contributions

A.Z. and S.H. designed the research, N.D. and X.G. performed the experiments, N.D., A.Z. and S.H. analyzed the data and all authors wrote the paper.

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Shlomo Havlin or An Zeng.

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Nature Computational Science thanks Ching Jin and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work. Primary Handling Editor: Fernando Chirigati, in collaboration with the Nature Computational Science team.

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Deng, N., Gu, X., Fan, Y. et al. The critical role of persistent disruption in advancing science.
Nat Comput Sci (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43588-025-00808-7

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  • Received: 11 October 2024

  • Accepted: 17 April 2025

  • Published: 20 May 2025

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s43588-025-00808-7

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