  Novelty, akin to gene mutation in evolution, opens possibilities for
scholarly advancement. Although peer review remains the gold standard for
evaluating novelty in scholarly communication and resource allocation, the vast
volume of submissions necessitates an automated measure of scholarly novelty.
Adopting a perspective that views novelty as the atypical combination of
existing knowledge, we introduce an information-theoretic measure of novelty in
scholarly publications. This measure quantifies the degree of 'surprise'
perceived by a language model that represents the word distribution of
scholarly discourse. The proposed measure is accompanied by face and construct
validity evidence; the former demonstrates correspondence to scientific common
sense, and the latter is endorsed through alignment with novelty evaluations
from a select panel of domain experts. Additionally, characterized by its
interpretability, fine granularity, and accessibility, this measure addresses
gaps prevalent in existing methods. We believe this measure holds great
potential to benefit editors, stakeholders, and policymakers, and it provides a
reliable lens for examining the relationship between novelty and academic
dynamics such as creativity, interdisciplinarity, and scientific advances.
