We introduce several measures of novelty for a scientific article in MEDLINE based on the concepts associated with it. The concepts associated with an article are identified using the Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) assigned to the article. A temporal profile was computed for each MeSH term (and the combination of pairs of MeSH terms) based on their overall occurrences in MEDLINE, after which papers are labeled by their most novel MeSH and pairs of MeSH as measured in years and volume of prior work. Across all papers in MEDLINE published since 1985, we find that individual concept novelty is rare (5.4% of papers have a MeSH <= 3 years old; 1.2% have a MeSH <= 20 papers old), while combinatorial novelty is the norm (55% have a pair of MeSH <= 3 years old; 78% have a pair of MeSH <= 20 papers old). Our novelty measures are positively correlated with citations rates, after accounting for the journal effect, but they are not strongly predictive. The correlation of our novelty measures with author age is more complex: of authors with > 50 papers about 90% had increasing individual novelty scores over their career on average, but the variability also increased. There is little, if any, correlation between the author age and the time-point of their most novel work. Our measures can be accessed at http://abel.lis.illinois.edu/gimli/novelty
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