How novel is that research paper? Competition to quantify concept crowns winner | Science | AAAS

Novelty is often called a key ingredient for high-quality research, but it is notoriously thorny to define or measure. A new tool that puts numbers to how novel a paper is, announced today, could help—and might be used by journals and conferences to more efficiently evaluate the growing flood of scientific manuscripts. The tool, which relies on artificial intelligence (AI), was crowned the winner of a global competition to design automated methods for assessing novelty, beating out 29 other entries to take home the £300,000 purse. Publishers have already expressed interest in using the tool, created by a team at the Jülich Research Center, to sniff out fresh ideas. The contest—the Metascience Novelty Indicators Challenge, run by UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) and partners—is itself “very interesting and novel,” says Lutz Bornmann of the Max Planck Society, who studies bibliometrics and research evaluation. But he cautions that many factors besides novelty determine research quality,

Novelty is often called a key ingredient for high-quality research, but it is notoriously thorny to define or measure. A new tool that puts numbers to how novel a paper is, announced today, could help—and might be used by journals and conferences to more efficiently evaluate the growing flood of scientific manuscripts. The tool, which relies on artificial intelligence (AI), was crowned the winner of a global competition to design automated methods for assessing novelty, beating out 29 other entries to take home the £300,000 purse. Publishers have already expressed interest in using the tool, c