Cognitive distance in scientific teams and innovative research outcomes

Scientific innovation increasingly emerges from collaborative research teams, yet the relationship between collaborators’ prior knowledge differences and innovative outcomes remains insufficiently understood. We introduce a large-scale measure of team cognitive distance using transformer-based scientific embeddings derived from more than 37 million OpenAlex publications between 1970 and 2024. Dynamic author-level knowledge representations are constructed from researchers’ prior publication histories, and team cognitive distance is defined as the average semantic distance among coauthors with usable pre-publication knowledge embeddings in the embedding space. We examine how this measure is associated with two complementary outcomes: scientific disruptiveness and combinatorial novelty. Greater team cognitive distance is positively associated with both outcomes, and the relationship remains positive across scientific fields, publication cohorts, and team sizes. The pattern is also observed when disruptiveness is measured over a common 5-year citation window, when nonlinear terms are included, and in a biomedical replication based on PubMed records and PubMedBERT embeddings. Interaction analyses show that the strength of the association varies across organizational and compositional contexts.