Conversation

Misses the biggest factor though imo — new paradigms. Article hints at that in passing — more pivoty seminal publications get more citations — but doesn’t unpack it. You can’t just “start a new field” because a topic is important. You have to start it *with* something.
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I’d argue that the burst of activity triggered by Covid was at least partly due to a “paradigm effect” rather than importance/social good. Many recognized that a huge natural experiment was underway and would paradigmatically reframe everything we thought we knew in many fields.
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I’m not actually a big fan of Kuhnian paradigm shift model, but I think it applies here to first order (I’m more in the Feyerabend methodological anarchy camp). Basically good researchers don’t work on what’s “important” but on what they have a promising attack for.
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