E-Book, Englisch, 258 Seiten
Vuong A New Theory of Serendipity: Nature, Emergence and Mechanism
1. Auflage 2019
ISBN: 978-83-66675-87-2
Verlag: De Gruyter
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
E-Book, Englisch, 258 Seiten
ISBN: 978-83-66675-87-2
Verlag: De Gruyter
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
The book explores the nature, underlying causes, and the information processing mechanism of serendipity. It proposes that natural or social survival demands drive serendipity, and serendipity is conditional on the environment and the mindset, on both individual and collective levels. From Darwin’s evolution theory to Sun Tzu’s war tactics, major innovations throughout human history are unified by this key concept. In the rapidly changing world, information is abundant but rather chaotic. The adaptive power of serendipity allows people to notice treasures within this wild sea, but only for those who understand how it works. To increase the probability of encountering and attaining serendipity, one should employ the mindsponge mechanism and the 3D process of creativity, for without these frameworks, serendipity is truly an elusive target. The book also discusses methods to build environments and cultures rich in navigational and useful information to maximize the chance of finding and capitalizing on serendipity. As a skill, serendipity has a resemblance to how kingfishers observe and hunt their prey Description of the peer review process for the book titled A New Theory of Serendipity ”A New Theory of Serendipity: Nature, Emergence and Mechanism” is covered by the following services:
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Chapter 2:
How do we perceive serendipity? Quy Khuc In order to set a ground for the new hypotheses, theory, and conceptual framework of serendipity, the current chapter aims to review the research landscapes, definitions, types, influential factors, and processes of serendipity. First, bibliometric analyses of 2982 documents retrieved from the Web of Science database were employed to examine the intellectual and conceptual structures in the research field of serendipity. Three major research lines are found: 1) information-seeking behaviors, 2) serendipity in business and sciences, and 3) serendipity in recommender systems. Then, a narrative review of the most notable documents and studies was done to overview the serendipity’s definitions, types, influential factors, and processes. Based on the review, we stipulate the literature gap in which the newly proposed hypotheses, theory, and conceptual framework will fit in. 2.1.Overall landscapes of serendipity research Before delving into the newly proposed theory and conceptual framework, reviewing the research landscapes, definitions, types, influential factors, and processes of serendipity is worthwhile. The bibliometric techniques were initially employed to reveal major themes and the development in the field of serendipity research. Specifically, the intellectual and conceptual structures were examined using VOSviewer, a bibliometric software for visualizing scientific landscapes (Van Eck & Waltman, 2014). The intellectual structure represents major research lines and their intellectual origins, while the conceptual structure expresses the conceptual focuses and their temporal change within the studied topic (Nguyen, Nguyen, et al., 2021). Here, we performed co-citation – the frequency of two documents being cited together by other units – analysis to explore serendipity research’s intellectual structure (Zupic & Cater, 2015). The conceptual structure was investigated by analyzing keyword cooccurrences (that is, keywords appear in the same document) (Nguyen, Pham, et al., 2021). The analyzed documents were retrieved from the Web of Science database (WoS) on December 14, 2021, using the following search query: TS = (“serendipity”). Figure 2.1: Annual publications related to serendipity The search resulted in 2982 documents in total. Five document types with the highest number of publications are research article (1615 documents), proceeding article (459), editorial material (276), review article (236), and book chapter (120), respectively. The first WoS-indexed publication about serendipity was the discussion of Rosenau (1935) on the concept of serendipity in 1935. Before the 1990s, only 55 serendipity-related documents were published, accounting for less than 2% of the total publications. Nevertheless, the annual number of publications on serendipity has grown exponentially since then (see Figure 2.1). A co-citation analysis was performed using a threshold of minimum citation number of the cited reference at 20, so 46 cited documents with a minimum of 20 citations are visualized in Figure 2.2 using fractional counting. Fractional counting was selected due to its theoretical and empirical advantages over full counting (Perianes-Rodriguez et al., 2016). Three features have to be considered when interpreting the intellectual structure map: •The node’s size is proportionate to its citation; •The distance between nodes represents the frequency of being co-cited; and, •The node’s color denotes the major research line. The co-citation analysis on the cited references of 2982 documents shows three major research lines within the research field dedicated to serendipity as follows. 1)Information-seeking behaviors (red), 2)Serendipity in business and sciences (blue), and 3)Serendipity in recommender systems (green) Table 2.1: Ten most influential publications Figure 2.2: Co-citation network of 46 cited references with a minimum of 20 citations (fractional counting) Studies in the first research line – so-called serendipity and information-seeking behaviors – mainly investigate the notion of serendipity in information-seeking contexts. In detail, they study how to increase the probability of obtaining serendipity which is usually considered to be “fortuitous” in nature (Foster & Ford, 2003; Makri & Blandford, 2012; McBirnie, 2008). The most influential research in this line is the study of Foster and Ford (2003) about the nature of serendipity in information-seeking behaviors of interdisciplinary scholars (see Table 2.1). Inquiring how to improve the chance of encountering serendipity in the digital environment is a recently emerging topic in this research line (Makri et al., 2014; Rubin et al., 2011). The distance from the first to the second research line – named serendipity in businesses and sciences – is relatively proximate. This is because the focal topics in the second research line are mostly about the roles of serendipity in businesses and sciences (Cunha et al., 2010; Dew, 2009; Eisenhardt, 1989; Fine & Deegan, 1996; Yaqub, 2018). The most cited works in this research line include two well-known books about serendipity: The Travels and Adventures of Serendipity: A Study in Sociological Semantics and the Sociology of Science written by Merton and Barber (2004) and Serendipity: Accidental Discoveries in Science written by Roberts (1989). Distinct from the first and second research lines, which tend to look at the psychological and behavioral aspects leading to serendipitous moments, the third research line – named serendipity in recommender systems – is technology-intensive. Serendipity is one of the two main quality evaluation metrics of a recommender system, so exploring how to improve serendipity in recommender systems is the primary aim of this research line. In the recommender system context, serendipity is associated with “the novelty of recommendations and in how far recommendations may positively surprise users” (Ge et al., 2010). We performed a co-word analysis employing a threshold of the minimum number of keyword occurrences at 20, which generates a conceptual map of 41 most frequently occurring keywords (see Figure 2.3). Both Author Keyword and Keyword Plus were included in the analysis. The ten most frequently occurring keywords in serendipity-related studies are model (79 occurrences), innovation (53), design (52), creativity (47), recommender systems (47), behavior (45), discovery (44), seeking (42), expression (37), and information (36). These keywords are closely aligned with three main research lines identified using co-citation analysis. The conceptual map in Figure 2.3 illustrates not only the occurrence of each keyword (proportionate to the node size) but also the temporal order of each keyword, in accordance with the node’s color. Explicitly, the more yellow the node is, the more recent the corresponding concept of the given node emerges. The ten most recently emerging concepts are literature listing (average publication year of 2018.48), recommender systems (2017.23), life (2016.45), search (2016), information-seeking (2015.04), stability (2014.87), drug discovery (2014.45), performance (2014.25), plates (2013.84), and cancer (2013.83). Literature listing keyword indicates a new type of publications that aims to introduce a list of newly published books, journal and conference articles on patents related to life sciences and pharmaceuticals, software, patent policy, strategic issues, and trademarks, etc. (Bates, 2017, 2019, 2020). The lists are partly generated by “serendipity.” Figure 2.3: Temporal co-word map of 41 keywords with a minimum of 20 occurrences (fractional counting) Moreover, the serendipity-related topics about recommender systems and information-seeking behaviors are quite new. Despite the fact that serendipity has long been occupying a crucial position in scientific progress, the relationship between serendipity and pharmaceutical and medical discoveries has been attracting more attention from scientists quite lately (Curtin, 2020; Ekins et al., 2017; Grivtsova et al., 2021; Sampat, 2012; Stahl & Baier, 2015). From these keywords, it can be seen that the serendipity concept is in most cases linked with progressive concepts (e.g., innovation, creativity, and discovery), information-seeking behaviors, and recommender system operation. In the next sub-sections, we will delve into the definitions, typology, influential factors and processes of serendipity. 2.2.Definitions and types •Definitions The word “serendipity” was coined by Horace Walpole, an English novelist and the youngest son of British Prime Minister Robert Walpole, in a letter that he wrote to his distant relative, Horace Mann. The word originated from the term “Serendip” in the fairy-tale “The Travels and Adventures of Three Princes of Serendip,” which was about three princes who discovered things they were not looking for by accidents and sagacity on their adventures....
