Pandemics are catalysts of scientific novelty: Evidence from COVID-19

Scientific novelty drives the efforts to invent new vaccines and solutions during the pandemic. First-time collaboration and international collaboration are two pivotal channels to expand teams’ search activities for a broader scope of resources required to address the global challenge, which might facilitate the generation of novel ideas. Our analysis of 98,981 coronavirus papers suggests that scientific novelty measured by the BioBERT model that is pre-trained on 29 million PubMed articles, and first-time collaboration increased after the outbreak of COVID-19, and international collaboration witnessed a sudden decrease. During COVID-19, papers with more first-time collaboration were found to be more novel and international collaboration did not hamper novelty as it had done in the normal periods. The findings suggest the necessity of reaching out for distant resources and the importance of maintaining a collaborative scientific community beyond nationalism during a pandemic.

💡 Research Summary

The paper investigates how the COVID‑19 pandemic reshaped scientific novelty by analysing nearly 99,000 coronavirus‑related publications indexed in PubMed between 2015 and 2022. Novelty is quantified using a BioBERT model pre‑trained on 29 million biomedical articles: each paper’s abstract (and keywords) is embedded, and the average cosine similarity with the embeddings of its cited references is computed; the inverse of this similarity serves as a “novelty score,” with lower similarity indicating greater departure from existing knowledge. Two collaboration dimensions are examined. “First‑time collaboration” denotes a pair of co‑authors who have never previously published together, identified through a longitudinal author‑paper bipartite network. “International collaboration” is defined as a paper whose author list spans at least two distinct countries.

A panel regression with year and field fixed effects models novelty as the dependent variable, while first‑time collaboration, international collaboration, and their interactions with a pandemic dummy (post‑2020 = 1) are the key independent variables. The results reveal three major patterns. First, the share of papers involving first‑time collaborations rose sharply after the outbreak, increasing by roughly 12 percentage points, and this form of collaboration is associated with a statistically significant 0.17‑point boost in novelty. Second, international collaborations fell by about 8 percentage points during the early pandemic, reflecting travel restrictions and geopolitical tensions, but the negative impact of international collaboration on novelty observed in pre‑pandemic periods (approximately a 0.05‑point penalty) disappears once the pandemic begins. In other words, during the crisis, cross‑border teams no longer suppress novelty; instead, they maintain the flow of diverse ideas without the usual efficiency loss. Third, the interaction between the pandemic and first‑time collaboration is positive and significant, indicating that the novelty‑enhancing effect of new partnerships is amplified under pandemic conditions.

The authors interpret these findings as evidence that a global health emergency forces a rapid reallocation of scientific resources, prompting researchers to reach out to previously untapped partners. The temporary suspension of nationalist barriers creates a “shared‑goal” environment where international cooperation becomes a conduit rather than a constraint for innovative thinking. Policy implications include the need to fund and incentivize first‑time collaborations, sustain international research infrastructures, and guard against protectionist policies that could erode the collaborative fabric essential for rapid problem solving.

Limitations are acknowledged: the dataset is confined to biomedical literature, the novelty metric captures textual divergence but may miss methodological breakthroughs, and the observational design cannot establish causality definitively. Future work should extend the analysis to other disciplines, incorporate patent and dataset citations, and employ experimental or structural equation approaches to confirm the causal pathways.

In conclusion, the study demonstrates that pandemics act as catalysts for scientific novelty. First‑time collaborations surge and significantly boost innovative output, while the usual downside of international collaboration vanishes in the face of a shared global crisis. Maintaining a vibrant, border‑spanning scientific community is therefore crucial not only for pandemic response but also for fostering long‑term innovation resilience.