Analysis of novelty of a scientific text as a basis for assessment of efficiency of scientific activities

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to complement an available system of qualitative analysis of efficiency of scientific activities with assessment of novelty of a subject of research that gives a more complete pattern for evaluating the efficiency of efforts of both scientists and research teams. Design/methodology/approach The approach is based on detection of specified linguistic patterns with further evaluation of similarity and novelty scores of obtained definitions at the sentence level. Findings This work presents an algorithm of automatic search for a new subject of research in scientific papers on the basis of statistical and linguistic analyses of description of new terms. Application of patterns specified in a given manuscript with further utilization of well-known methods of similarity and novelty detection scores makes it possible to evaluate the degree of novelty of a subject of research. Practical implications As a practical application of the proposed algorithm, the algorithm of determination of authority of a scientist will facilitate assessment of personal contributions of certain authors made in a certain field of study. Originality/value The main contribution of a given manuscript is in application of linguistic patterns recognition and calculation of similarity and novelty scores to the area of scientific results with further proposition of the method of automatic search for a new subject of research in scientific manuscripts.