Knowledge that Transforms

This paper offers a critical reassessment of claims that scientific progress is best understood through the disruptiveness of new research. Park, Leahey and Funk in Nature (2023) have re-opened the debate by presenting results using the citation-based ‘CD index’ to assess the extent to which individual academic publications are consolidating or disruptive. Analyzing Park et al. as a focal point of these claims, we challenge the adequacy of this approach to capture both genuine scientific disruption and scientific progress, particularly within the social sciences. Drawing on philosophy and sociology of science, we show that scientific progress is predominantly cumulative rather than disruptive, and that papers’ high disruptiveness scores may often reflect phenomena such as pseudo-novelty or fragmentation rather than true epistemic breakthroughs. Our analysis demonstrates that in fields marked by intellectual pluralism and weak paradigmatic consensus, apparent disruptiveness may be an artifact of scholarly practices rather than an indication of substantive innovation. Hence, measures of disruptiveness appear ill-suited as a marker of scientific progress – as used in individual and collective research evaluations. Instead, we advance a constructive agenda by proposing that scientific progress is best conceptualized not as a dichotomy between cumulation and disruptiveness, but as a multi-dimensional process embracing elements of both disruption and consolidation within an overarching cumulative trajectory, whereby established knowledge is iteratively refined, rejected, or recombined in the light of new evidence or insight. By rethinking how scientific advancement is measured and cultivated, and suggesting ways to foster cumulative scientific progress, this article contributes to the theory and practice of research evaluation. • Citation metrics misrepresent progress in fragmented social science fields. • Disruption scores may often reflect novelty theatre, not real breakthroughs. • Social science progress is largely cumulative, seldom driven by disruption. • Scientific progress is multi-dimensional, covering both disruption and cumulation. • Research policy should reward cumulative knowledge-building, not only novelty.

We examine the use of scientific research in the development of policy documents within the context of clinical practice guidelines (CPGs) for diagnosing, treating, and managing diabetes. Using natural language processing, we identify “hidden citations” (i.e., textual credit without formal citations) and “token citations” (i.e., formal citations without textual credit) to scientific research within CPGs to understand how scientific evidence is selected and integrated. We find that both types of citations are pervasive, calling into question the use of formal citations alone in understanding the societal impact of scientific research. Using data on scholarly citations and expert ratings, we find that hidden citations are positively associated with the actual impact of the research on patients and caregivers while token citations associate positively with scientific impact. Qualitative insights gathered from interviews with senior guideline writers further illustrate the reasons for certain functions of scientific research, which involve balancing scientific rigor with practical demands in the guideline writing process, the need for local adaptations, political dynamics on the organizational level, and individual preferences towards certain types of studies or the use of experiential knowledge. Our work underscores the critical role of research utilization in translating scientific evidence into policy, showing that policymaker decisions shape societal impact as much as the engagement efforts of scientists, and extends institutional accounts of symbolic and substantive knowledge use. • We examine the utilization patterns of scientific research in policy documents. • We focus on how scientific evidence is selected and integrated in the context of clinical practice guidelines (CPGs) for the diagnosis, treatment, and management of diabetes. • We identify “hidden citations” (i.e., textual credit without formal citations) and “token citations” (i.e., formal citations without textual credit) to scientific research within CPGs. • Both types of citations are pervasive, calling into question the use of formal citations alone in understanding the societal impact of scientific research. • Qualitative insights further illustrate the reasons for certain use patterns of scientific research.

In this work we characterise French firms using artificial intelligence (AI) in 2018 and explore the link between AI use and productivity. We distinguish AI users that source AI from external providers (AI buyers) from those developing their own AI systems (AI developers) based on the official French ICT survey, that provides information about the use of AI by firms. AI buyers tend to be larger than other firms, but this relation is explained by ICT-related variables. Conversely, AI developers are larger and younger beyond ICT. Other digital technologies, digital skills, and infrastructure play a key role for AI use, with AI developers leveraging more specialised ICT human capital than AI buyers. Overall, AI users tend to be more productive, however this is related to the self-selection of more productive and digital-intensive firms into AI use. This is not the case for AI developers, for which the positive link between AI use and productivity remains positive and significant. This relationship persists across multiple robustness checks, including analyses addressing endogeneity concerns.

This paper examines the interplay between firms’ investments in digital skills and employment dynamics within the Danish labor market. We employ novel digital skill demand measures derived from online job postings using natural language processing techniques. We document a strong positive correlation between demand for digital skills, particularly in data science and AI, and firm productivity. Using dynamic lead–lag models, we estimate a positive relationship between digital skill investments and firm-level employment. This positive association is broad-based across demographic groups, and is stronger in certain occupations when specifically considering data science and AI skills. While digitalization drives job creation and productivity gains overall, the workforce impacts of specific technologies are heterogeneous. Our results suggest that digitalization, and particularly data science and AI adoption, may amplify existing labor market disparities across occupations, industries, and regions.

Whilst it is well-known that research funding significantly shapes research landscapes, there is too little known about the processes that sit behind the funding opportunities — and specifically the publicly-shared funding call texts. The aim of this paper is therefore to investigate the processes experienced by EU funding professionals in authoring and operationalising funding call texts, to surface the different ways in which interdisciplinarity is understood. In seeing these texts as artefacts of situated practices, we conducted a case study on the European Union (EU) Cluster 5 Work Programmes (on climate, energy, mobility) as part of Horizon Europe, including its predecessor calls in Horizon2020. From our analysis of 15 semi-structured interviews, we identified 10 roles that funding professionals adopt, across three stages of a funding call text lifetime: within the Call Creation stage (led by European Commission Policy Officers), there was Steering, Feedback Integration, Quality Control, and Disruption; the Call Dissemination stage (led by EU National Contact Points) involved Awareness-raising, Matchmaking, and Gap-spotting; and the Proposal Selection stage (led by Commission Project Officers overseeing evaluations) involved Expertise Cultivation, Consensus-building, and being a Critical Friend. This study provides empirically-driven insights into the dynamic social processes and institutional interactions, through which funding calls are negotiated, interpreted and ultimately travel. As such, we also contribute to literature on interdisciplinarity, by examining the ways in which different forms of interdisciplinarity are imagined, designed-in, rewarded and excluded by funders. We make clear how integrating Social Sciences and Humanities, and doing interdisciplinarity, consistently represents hard work by funding professionals. • How funding professionals produce and use funding call texts affects research landscapes. • Horizon Europe Pillar 2 funding is especially complex as it is driven by EU policy priorities. • 10 professional roles directly shaped the forms of interdisciplinarity being funded. • Professionals must work hard to ensure opportunities for Social Sciences and Humanities. • Professionals demonstrate partial agency in steering funding processes.

Sustainability challenges, such as water resource management, increasingly demand frontier technologies and the coordination of diverse stakeholders. Living labs have surged globally—often backed by public funding—as pivotal intermediaries in these contexts. Although their effectiveness is debated, little attention has been paid to how they address the challenges of implementing sustainability-oriented innovations that leverage advanced science and engage multiple stakeholders. Focusing on the project level, where operational complexities are most apparent, we examine the ‘MOSIS’ initiative to enhance water management along the Senegal River using a science-based Earth Observation system. This project involves academia, industry, governments, international organisations, and a living lab. Recognised at CoP26 and considered by the World Bank for broader scaling, MOSIS exemplifies the integration of cutting-edge technologies and multi-stakeholder coordination. We identify three roles—technological expert, stakeholder orchestrator, and end-user empowerer—each corresponding to one dimension of legitimacy (instrumental, relational, and moral). When combined, these roles create synergies that endow the living lab with strong active legitimacy, but also trigger dis-synergies that obscure the categorical cues required for passive cognitive legitimacy. We term this predicament the “Cursed Catalyst”: a situation whereby an intermediary's success yields an unbalanced legitimacy portfolio that, unless proactively rebalanced by efforts to strengthen cognitive legitimacy, ultimately constrains its perceived impact on sustainable innovation and jeopardises its long-term survival. These findings have significant implications for research policy and funding bodies, which rely on living labs to accelerate the transfer of frontier science into real-world sustainability contexts. • Highlights living labs' multiple roles in complex sustainability projects • Explores how overlapping roles cause stakeholder confusion and under-recognition. • Introduces “cursed catalyst” to explain the undermining of cognitive legitimacy. • Proposes strategies to foster appreciation of living labs' critical contributions.

Grant peer review (GPR) is a cornerstone of modern research funding, yet the process by which reviewers integrate multiple criteria into a single overall evaluation—known as commensuration —remains poorly understood. We study the implicit weights that reviewers assign to PI qualifications, research quality, and societal relevance, using a unique dataset of 2105 review reports for 586 proposals submitted to the Swedish Foundation for Strategic Research (2011–2017), complemented by manual coding of comments and interviews with screeners and funding officers. Commensuration influences roughly 29% of final scores. The research quality criterion dominates evaluations, receiving about twice the weight of relevance. This commensuration pattern is surprisingly stable across pools of reviewers from different fields and geographic areas and irrespective of the reviewers' profile and their presumed ability to assess relevance. PI qualifications generally play a minor role, tempering concerns about pervasive reputational advantages, and tend to be used more when evaluators feel less competent, hinting that reputation is used as a fallback consideration when the reviewer lacks confidence. Overall, the results suggest that commensuration may systematically contribute to prioritizing technical merit over relevance even beyond the intentions of the funders.

Our current production and consumption systems generate urban waste that has become a significant sustainability transition challenge. The urgency of the issue and the failure to appreciate the long-term consequences of policies lead to choices that are effective in the short term with little effort, analogous to reaching for ‘low-hanging fruit’. However, these choices also lead to the neglect of opportunities to explore policies that may eliminate the root causes of the issue and lead to long-term improvements in the capabilities and performance of Solid Waste Management (SWM) systems. In this way, path dependence builds in SWM systems and keeps them in a capability trap, i.e., an operation mode of low performance and low value. In this paper, we introduce capability trap theory to transition studies and illustrate it in the case of Accra's SWM system in Ghana, and its transition from a linear to a circular mode of operation. In the analysis of the case, we use the whole system reconfiguration approach to ‘zoom out’ to the whole system structure and appreciate the multiple sources of change and their effects on the system structure. Then, we use the system dynamics approach to ‘zoom in’ to the feedback loops of the SWM sub-systems and show how they give rise to the capability trap. We draw on stakeholder interviews and workshops to identify leverage points for path creation towards a sustainable, circular SWM system. The combination of the two approaches and the introduction of capability trap theory into transition studies enhances our understanding of path dependence and leverage points for path creation in transition processes.

This study examines the impact of external and internal knowledge diversity in research grant proposals on academic performance in social sciences. External knowledge diversity is measured by calculating the semantic similarity between 10,482 social science research grant proposals from the National Science Foundation (NSF) between 1970 and 2019, and 74,056 proposals from 22 other disciplines, using SciBERT and cosine similarity. Internal knowledge diversity is determined by the variety of research categories derived from clustering within social science proposals. Additionally, we analyze 635,910 scientific publications of social science principal investigators (PIs). We investigate how the intellectual proximity between PIs' doctoral and postdoctoral publication abstracts and their proposals affects academic performance. Our findings reveal that increasing external or internal knowledge diversity in grant proposals is not significantly related to social science scholars' productivity or research impact. This lack of a statistically significant relationship suggests that while social science PIs may possess sufficient adaptive capacity to manage diverse knowledge portfolios without performance degradation, the anticipated ‘diversity premium’ did not materialize. In contrast, greater intellectual proximity between research proposals and PIs' early-career research during doctoral and postdoctoral stages significantly improves research impact. The impact of postdoctoral intellectual proximity scales with knowledge diversity, providing the essential expertise required for successful interdisciplinary integration and high-impact research.