"This paper unpacked the complex, temporally evolving relationship between citation impact alongside metrics of novelty and disruption, which focus on path-breaking contributions that moves the scientific frontier...By focusing on future science, the slowly accumulating pattern of novel and disruptive research contributions reveal sustained resistance to radically new ideas. This underscores the history of how many significant breakthroughs of modern science were initially rejected or ignored, sometimes for decades. Consider Darwin’s theory of evolution introduced in 1859; the atom conception proposed by Ludwig Boltzmann in the 1870s, the Continental Drift model formulated in 1912 by Richard Wegener; the Big Bang theory of the origin of the universe formalized by Georges Lemaître in the 1920s, and the gravitational wave theory by Albert Einstein in 1916. Resistance to more recent science includes denial of documented hazards from tobacco and DDT, ozone depletion, and climate change (Oreskes and Conway 2011). The “sleeping beauty” model (Ke et al. 2015) captures this pattern and suggests that a scientist’s eureka moment may take decades to be validated and appreciated. A similar pattern observed in technology is named after “J-curve” theory, which suggests that revolutionary, general-purpose technologies (GPTs) like steam engines, electricity, and AI always take a long time to diffuse as they demand and grow complementary technologies, but once a supportive environment has bloomed, they dramatically extend productivity (Brynjolfsson, Rock, and Syverson 2018). However, neither of these theories linked the characters of scientific discoveries or technological innovations to their influential outcomes and confirmed that novelty indeed succeeds in time. Our study identifies and recovers this missing piece of puzzle in the science of innovation”
