ArticleScientific reports2014
The dynamics of correlated novelties.
Article in Scientific reports, 2014. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 46 papers.
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Who cites it
46 citing papers in PubMed.
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- The networks of ingredient combinations as culinary fingerprints of world cuisines.NPJ science of food · 2025Article
- The dynamics of higher-order novelties.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Conceptual structure and the growth of scientific knowledge.Nature human behaviour · 2024Article
- Idea engines: Unifying innovation & obsolescence from markets & genetic evolution to science.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Interacting innovation processes.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Quantifying the complexity and similarity of chess openings using online chess community data.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Urban economic fitness and complexity from patent data.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- The Typical Set and Entropy in Stochastic Systems with Arbitrary Phase Space Growth.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Article
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- Simulating emergence of novelties using agent-based models.PloS one · 2023Article
- Innovation in crisis: The role of 'exaptive relations' for medical device development in response to COVID-19.Technological forecasting and social change · 2022Article
- Modeling innovation in the cryptocurrency ecosystem.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Twitter as an innovation process with damping effect.Scientific reports · 2021Article
- The Compressed Vocabulary of Microbial Life.Frontiers in microbiology · 2021Article
- The growth and form of knowledge networks by kinesthetic curiosity.Current opinion in behavioral sciences · 2020Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Novelties are a familiar part of daily life. They are also fundamental to the evolution of biological systems, human society, and technology. By opening new possibilities, one novelty can pave the way for others in a process that Kauffman has called "expanding the adjacent possible". The dynamics of correlated novelties, however, have yet to be quantified empirically or modeled mathematically. Here we propose a simple mathematical model that mimics the process of exploring a physical, biological, or conceptual space that enlarges whenever a novelty occurs. The model, a generalization of Polya's urn, predicts statistical laws for the rate at which novelties happen (Heaps' law) and for the probability distribution on the space explored (Zipf's law), as well as signatures of the process by which one novelty sets the stage for another. We test these predictions on four data sets of human activity: the edit events of Wikipedia pages, the emergence of tags in annotation systems, the sequence of words in texts, and listening to new songs in online music catalogues. By quantifying the dynamics of correlated novelties, our results provide a starting point for a deeper understanding of the adjacent possible and its role in biological, cultural, and technological evolution.
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