# The Diversity-Innovation Paradox in Science

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1909.02063 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.02063/

## Key facts

- Cited by 21 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 4 Sep 2019.

## Built on by (most cited first, 21 of 21)

- [OpenReviewer: A Specialized Large Language Model for Generating Critical Scientific Paper Reviews](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.11948/) (2024)
- [What Can Natural Language Processing Do for Peer Review?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.06563/) (2024)
- [When Fair Ranking Meets Uncertain Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.02091/) (2021)
- [Words as Gatekeepers: Measuring Discipline-specific Terms and Meanings in Scholarly Publications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09676/) (2022)
- [A review on the novelty measurements of academic papers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.17456/) (2025)
- [PubGraph: A Large-Scale Scientific Knowledge Graph](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.02231/) (2023)
- [Navigating the Landscape of Hint Generation Research: From the Past to the Future](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.04728/) (2024)
- [Harnessing Large Language Models for Scientific Novelty Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.24615/) (2025)
- [AI Research Agents Narrow Scientific Exploration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.27905/) (2026)
- [AI-Driven Automation Can Become the Foundation of Next-Era Science of Science Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.12039/) (2025)
- [AI Can Enhance Creativity in Social Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.15264/) (2024)
- [Mapping the Evolution of Research Contributions using KnoVo](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.17508/) (2025)
- [The Homogenization Problem in LLMs: Towards Meaningful Diversity in AI Safety](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.06116/) (2026)
- [Identifying Causal Influences on Publication Trends and Behavior: A Case Study of the Computational Linguistics Community](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.07938/) (2021)
- [Causal Effect of Group Diversity on Redundancy and Coverage in Peer-Reviewing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.11437/) (2024)
- [Identifying Emerging Concepts in Large Corpora](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.21315/) (2025)
- [A Moonshot for AI Oracles in the Sciences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.17836/) (2024)
- [Decoding Digital Influence: The Role of Social Media Behavior in Scientific Stratification Through Logistic Attribution Method](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.15854/) (2024)
- [Big Data and the Computational Social Science of Entrepreneurship and Innovation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.08706/) (2025)
- [Where Do Your Citations Come From? Citation-Constellation: A Free, Open-Source, No-Code, and Auditable Tool for Citation Network Decomposition with Complementary BARON and HEROCON Scores](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.24216/) (2026)
- [Discovery by Dreaming: Cross-Domain Recombination in Artificial Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.16256/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Prior work finds a diversity paradox: diversity breeds innovation, and yet, underrepresented groups that diversify organizations have less successful careers within them. Does the diversity paradox hold for scientists as well? We study this by utilizing a near-population of ~1.2 million US doctoral recipients from 1977-2015 and following their careers into publishing and faculty positions. We use text analysis and machine learning to answer a series of questions: How do we detect scientific innovations? Are underrepresented groups more likely to generate scientific innovations? And are the innovations of underrepresented groups adopted and rewarded? Our analyses show that underrepresented groups produce higher rates of scientific novelty. However, their novel contributions are devalued and discounted: e.g., novel contributions by gender and racial minorities are taken up by other scholars at lower rates than novel contributions by gender and racial majorities, and equally impactful contributions of gender and racial minorities are less likely to result in successful scientific careers than for majority groups. These results suggest there may be unwarranted reproduction of stratification in academic careers that discounts diversity's role in innovation and partly explains the underrepresentation of some groups in academia.