This study focuses on a recently introduced type of indicator measuring disruptiveness in science. Disruptive research diverges from current lines of research by opening up new lines. In the current study, we included the initially proposed indicator of this new type (Funk & Owen-Smith, 2017; Wu, Wang, & Evans, 2019) and several variants with DI₁: DI₅, DI_1n, DI_5n, and DEP. Since indicators should measure what they propose to measure, we investigated the convergent validity of the indicators. We used a list of milestone papers, selected and published by editors of Physical Review Letters, and investigated whether this human (experts)-based list is related to values of the several disruption indicators variants and – if so – which variants show the highest correlation with expert judgements. We used bivariate statistics, multiple regression models, and (coarsened) exact matching (CEM) to investigate the convergent validity of the indicators. The results show that the indicators correlate differently with the milestone paper assignments by the editors. It is not the initially proposed disruption index that performed best (DI₁), but the variant DI₅ which has been introduced by Bornmann, Devarakonda, Tekles, and Chacko (2020a). In the CEM analysis of this study, the DEP variant – introduced by Bu, Waltman, and Huang (in press) – also showed favorable results.

这项研究的重点是最近引入的一种衡量科学破坏性的指标。破坏性研究通过开辟新的领域而不同于当前的研究领域。在当前的研究中，我们包括了最初建议的这种新类型的指标（Funk＆Owen-Smith，2017; Wu，Wang，＆Evans，2019）和具有DI _1的几种变体：DI ₅，DI _1n，DI _5n和DEP。由于指标应衡量其建议衡量的指标，因此我们研究了指标的收敛有效性。我们使用了《物理评论快报》的编辑选择和发表的里程碑论文清单，并调查了这个基于人（专家）的列表是否与多个破坏指标变体的值相关；如果是，则哪些变体与专家判断的相关性最高。我们使用双变量统计，多元回归模型和（粗略）精确匹配（CEM）来研究指标的收敛有效性。结果表明，指标与编辑人员分配的里程碑论文有不同的相关性。并不是最初提出的最佳干扰指数（DI ₁），而是由Bornmann，Devarakonda，Tekles和Chacko（2020a）引入的变体DI ₅。在这项研究的CEM分析中，由Bu，Waltman和Huang（印刷中）介绍的DEP变体也显示出了令人满意的结果。