To what extent do simultaneous innovations occur and are independently from each other? In this paper we use a novel persistent keyword framework to systematically identify innovations in a large corpus containing academic papers in evolutionary medicine between 2007 and 2011. We examine whether innovative papers occurring simultaneously are independent from each other by evaluating the citation and co-authorship information gathered from the corpus metadata. We find that 19 out of 22 simultaneous innovative papers do, in fact, occur independently from each other. In particular, co-authors of simultaneous innovative papers are no more geographically concentrated than the co-authors of similar non-innovative papers in the field. Our result suggests producing innovative work draws from a collective knowledge pool, rather than from knowledge circulating in distinct localized collaboration networks. Therefore, new ideas can appear at multiple locations and with geographically dispersed co-authorship networks. Our findings support the perspective that simultaneous innovations are the outcome of collective behavior.

创新在多大程度上同时发生并且彼此独立？在本文中，我们使用新颖的持久关键词框架来系统地识别包含 2007 年至 2011 年间进化医学学术论文的大型语料库中的创新。我们通过评估引用和共同作者信息来检查同时发生的创新论文是否彼此独立。从语料库元数据收集。我们发现，22 篇同时发生的创新论文中，有 19 篇实际上是相互独立发生的。特别是，同时创新论文的合著者在地理上并不比该领域类似非创新论文的合著者更集中。我们的结果表明，创新工作的产生来自集体知识库，而不是来自不同本地化协作网络中流通的知识。因此，新的想法可以出现在多个地点并具有地理上分散的合着网络。我们的研究结果支持这样的观点：同步创新是集体行为的结果。