Bibliometrics has long sought to measure epistemic change through publication data, but current approaches are constrained by methodological conventions. Recent indicators attempting to measure novelty, originality, or disruptiveness in individual papers rely on three problematic assumptions: that epistemic change is a discrete event rather than a process, that it is fully contained in a single paper, and that quantifiable measures can replace detailed descriptions of the specific nature of changes.
The field faces fundamental challenges in validating bibliometric measures of epistemic change, including reliance on bibliographic metadata whose relationship to actual paper content remains unclear, the need for ground truths to test new methods, and questions about what information in metadata can support such measurement. This special collection brings together work from a series of workshops addressing how epistemic change can be properly conceptualized, operationalized, validated, and identified using both traditional bibliometric approaches and emerging computational methods.