  Many theories of scientific and technological progress imagine science as an
iterative, developmental process periodically interrupted by innovations which
disrupt and restructure the status quo. Due to the immense societal value
created by these disruptive scientific and technological innovations,
accurately operationalizing this perspective into quantifiable terms represents
a key challenge for researchers seeking to understand the history and
mechanisms underlying scientific and technological progress. Researchers have
recently proposed a number of quantitative measures that seek to quantify the
extent to which works in science and technology are disruptive with respect to
their scientific context. While these disruption measures show promise in their
ability to quantify potentially disruptive works of science and technology,
their definitions are bespoke to the science of science and lack a broader
theoretical framework, obscuring their interrelationships and limiting their
adoption within broader network science paradigms. We propose a mathematical
framework for conceptualizing and measuring disruptive scientific contributions
within citation networks through the lens of network centrality, and formally
relate the CD Index disruption measure and its variants to betweenness
centrality. By reinterpreting disruption through the lens of centrality, we
unify a number of existing citation-based disruption measures while
simultaneously providing natural generalizations which enjoy empirical and
computational efficiencies. We validate these theoretical observations by
computing a variety of disruption measures on real citation data and find that
computing these centrality-based disruption measures over ego networks of
increasing radius results in better discernment of award-winning scientific
innovations relative to conventional disruption metrics which rely on local
citation context alone.
