What is Highly Creative Scientific Research?

What do we mean by highly creative scientific research? We suggest that highly-creative scientific research combines:

Novelty. In order for research to qualify as "creative", it needs to go beyond current knowledge, it needs to be new and unexpected; and

High-quality and usefulness. Creative work is usually associated with an exceptional and extraordinary level of quality and appropriateness for a given problem.

Now, the question is: How can we operationalize this general definition? How can we translate it in a way that makes it approachable for empirical research of creative science?

We have answered this question by developing the following typology of research accomplishments:

Source: Thomas Heinze, Philip Shapira, Jacqueline Senker, and Stefan Kuhlmann (2007). Identifying creative research accomplishments: Methodology and results for nanotechnology and human genetics, Scientometrics, 70, 1, 125-152 [http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11192-007-0108-6]. This article discusses our approach in detail. See also our publications page.