Extended Data Fig. 7: Alternative measures of disruption.
From: Papers and patents are becoming less disruptive over time
This figure shows the decline in the disruption of papers (a, n = 100,000) and patents (b, n = 100,000) based on two alternative measures of disruption. The blue lines calculate disruption using a measure proposed in Bornmann et al.13, \({{DI}}_{l}^{{nok}}\) where l = 5, which makes the measure more resilient to marginal changes in the number of papers or patents that only cite the focal work’s references. The orange lines calculate disruption using a measure proposed in Leydesdorff et al.15, DI*, which makes the measure less sensitive to small changes in the forward citation patterns of papers or patents that make no backward citations. Shaded bands correspond to 95% confidence intervals. With both alternative measures, we observe decreases in disruption for papers and patents, suggesting that the decline is not an artefact of our operationalization of disruption.
