  Scientific novelty drives the efforts to invent new vaccines and solutions
during the pandemic. First-time collaboration and international collaboration
are two pivotal channels to expand teams' search activities for a broader scope
of resources required to address the global challenge, which might facilitate
the generation of novel ideas. Our analysis of 98,981 coronavirus papers
suggests that scientific novelty measured by the BioBERT model that is
pre-trained on 29 million PubMed articles, and first-time collaboration
increased after the outbreak of COVID-19, and international collaboration
witnessed a sudden decrease. During COVID-19, papers with more first-time
collaboration were found to be more novel and international collaboration did
not hamper novelty as it had done in the normal periods. The findings suggest
the necessity of reaching out for distant resources and the importance of
maintaining a collaborative scientific community beyond nationalism during a
pandemic.
