The innovation trade-off: how following superstars shapes academic novelty

Academic success is distributed unequally; a few top scientists receive the bulk of attention, citations, and resources. However, do these “superstars” foster leadership in scientific innovation? We employ a series of information-theoretic measures that quantify novelty, innovation, and impact from scholarly citation networks, and compare the academic output of scientists in the American Physical Society corpus with varying levels of connections to superstar scientists. The strength of connection is based on the frequency of citations to superstar papers, which is also related to the frequency of collaboration. We find that while strongly-connected scientists publish more, garner more citations, and produce moderately more diverse content, this comes at a cost of lower innovation, less disruption, and higher redundancy of ideas. Further, once one removes papers co-authored with superstars, the academic output of these strongly connected scientists greatly diminishes. In contrast, authors who publish at the same rate without the benefit of collaborations with scientific superstars produce papers that are more innovative, more disruptive, and have comparable citation rates, once one controls for the transferred prestige of superstars. On balance, our results indicate that academia pays a price by focusing attention and resources on superstars.