  Since the 1950s, citation impact has been the dominant metric by which
science is quantitatively evaluated. But research contributions play distinct
roles in the unfolding drama of scientific debate, agreement and advance, and
institutions may value different kinds of advances. Computational power, access
to citation data and an array of modeling techniques have given rise to a
widening portfolio of metrics to extract different signals regarding their
contribution. Here we unpack the complex, temporally evolving relationship
between citation impact alongside novelty and disruption, two emerging measures
that capture the degree to which science not only influences, but transforms
later work. Novelty captures how research draws upon unusual combinations of
prior work. Disruption captures how research comes to eclipse the prior work on
which it builds, becoming recognized as a new scientific direction. We
demonstrate that: 1) novel papers disrupt existing theories and expand the
scientific frontier; 2) novel papers are more likely to become "sleeping
beauties" and accumulate citation impact over the long run; 3) novelty can be
reformulated as distance in journal embedding spaces to map the moving frontier
of science. The evolution of embedding spaces over time reveals how yesterday's
novelty forms today's scientific conventions, which condition the novelty--and
surprise--of tomorrow's breakthroughs.
