Eureka! Scientists develop new way to detect breakthroughs in science

The history of science and technology is marked by major breakthroughs — the theory of evolution, the splitting of the atom, the development of antibiotics — and a research team including faculty at Binghamton University, State University of New York, has developed a method to help pinpoint discoveries that reshaped the course of science. 

A study publishing in Science Advances on April 1 maps the landscape of innovation to identify disruptive studies and patents that challenge existing paradigms and inspire waves of follow-up research. The measure was developed by a team including Sadamori Kojaku, assistant professor of systems science and industrial engineering at Binghamton University, along with his colleagues Munjung Kim and Yong-­Yeol Ahn at the University of Virginia.

Progress in science is often marked by major breakthroughs, but tracking which discoveries are truly revolutionary is a monumental task. A disruptive work makes prior research obsolete, leaving traces in how future papers cite it. But the most widely used metric focuses only on a paper’s closest citations, missing the bigger picture. This narrow view makes it particularly unreliable for simultaneous discoveries, where the bigger picture matters.

“Science doesn’t evolve incrementally, but sometimes we see abrupt changes. Scholars are interested in when and why exactly the disruption happens,” Kojaku said. “And to do that, we need to create a metric to kind of tell scholars, ‘OK, this is the disruption happening in a given year.’”

Using a machine-learning technique known as neural embedding, the researchers built a map of approximately 55 million scientific papers and patents. Each paper is represented by two points — one reflecting the research it built upon, another reflecting the research it inspired. When a paper is truly disruptive, these two points are far apart, meaning it redirected future research away from what came before it.

The system can identify major breakthroughs, like Nobel Prize-winning papers, but unlike other disruption indexes, it is sensitive to broader contexts and can better identify “simultaneous discoveries.” A good example of a simultaneous discovery is the development of the theory of evolution by both Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace, or the development of differential calculus by Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz.

Knowing when major breakthroughs occur can help us better understand the conditions that lead to disruptive moments and fuel more breakthrough science. 

“By having more accurate metrics, we can actually investigate where the disruption is happening in the map of science,” Kojaku said. “It can have significant implications for science policy. It’s also helpful for prioritizing funding. We now have the quantitative metrics to investigate at which stage of research the disruptive work occurs and matters most.”

After reviewing the impact of research papers, the researchers are considering a follow-up paper focused specifically on tracing the trajectory of individual researchers. 

The paper, “Uncovering simultaneous breakthroughs with a robust measure of disruptiveness,” will be published in Science Advances on April 1, 2026.