Serendipity in Science

TL;DR

This study empirically examines how serendipity influences scientific innovation, revealing that openness enhances benefits from chance encounters, leading to more innovative research, while deep experience has less impact.

Contribution

The paper provides large-scale empirical evidence on how a policy change affected scientists' exposure to serendipitous information and its impact on research innovativeness.

Findings

Openness increases likelihood of benefiting from serendipity.

Serendipity leads to more innovative publications.

Deep experience has limited effect on serendipitous benefits.

Abstract

Serendipity plays an important role in scientific discovery. Indeed, many of the most important breakthroughs, ranging from penicillin to the electric battery, have been made by scientists who were stimulated by a chance exposure to unsought but useful information. However, not all scientists are equally likely to benefit from such serendipitous exposure. Although scholars generally agree that scientists with a prepared mind are most likely to benefit from serendipitous encounters, there is much less consensus over what precisely constitutes a prepared mind, with some research suggesting the importance of openness and others emphasizing the need for deep prior experience in a particular domain. In this paper, we empirically investigate the role of serendipity in science by leveraging a policy change that exogenously shifted the shelving location of journals in university libraries and subsequently exposed scientists to unsought scientific information. Using large-scale data on 2.4 million papers published in 9,750 journals by 520,000 scientists at 115 North American research universities, we find that scientists with greater openness are more likely to benefit from serendipitous encounters. Following the policy change, these scientists tended to cite less familiar and newer work, and ultimately published papers that were more innovative. By contrast, we find little effect on innovativeness for scientists with greater depth of experience, who, in our sample, tended to cite more familiar and older work following the policy change.