  Citation count is a popular index for assessing scientific papers. However,
it depends on not only the quality of a paper but also various factors, such as
conventionality, team size, and gender. Here, we examine the extent to which
the conventionality of a paper is related to its citation percentile in a
discipline by using our measure, topic disparity. The topic disparity is the
cosine distance between a paper and its discipline on a neural embedding space.
Using this measure, we show that the topic disparity is negatively associated
with the citation percentile in many disciplines, even after controlling team
size and the genders of the first and last authors. This result indicates that
less conventional research tends to receive fewer citations than conventional
research. Our proposed method can be used to complement the raw citation counts
and to recommend papers at the periphery of a discipline because of their less
conventional topics.
