Inspiration or preparation? Explaining creativity in scientific enterprise

Human creativity is the ultimate driving force behind scientific progress. While the building blocks of innovations are often embodied in existing knowledge, it is creativity that blends seemingly disparate ideas. Existing studies have made striding advances in quantifying creativity of scientific publications by investigating their citation relationships. Yet, little is known hitherto about the underlying mechanisms governing scientific creative processes, largely due to that a paper's references, at best, only partially reflect its authors' actual information consumption. This work represents an initial step towards fine-grained understanding of creative processes in scientific enterprise. In specific, using two web-scale longitudinal datasets (120.1 million papers and 53.5 billion web requests spanning 4 years), we directly contrast authors' information consumption behaviors against their knowledge products. We find that, of 59.0% papers across all scientific fields, 25.7% of their creativity can be readily explained by information consumed by their authors. Further, by leveraging these findings, we develop a predictive framework that accurately identifies the most critical knowledge to fostering target scientific innovations. We believe that our framework is of fundamental importance to the study of scientific creativity. It promotes strategies to stimulate and potentially automate creative processes, and provides insights towards more effective designs of information recommendation platforms.