  Serendipity plays an important role in scientific discovery. Indeed, many of
the most important breakthroughs, ranging from penicillin to the electric
battery, have been made by scientists who were stimulated by a chance exposure
to unsought but useful information. However, not all scientists are equally
likely to benefit from such serendipitous exposure. Although scholars generally
agree that scientists with a prepared mind are most likely to benefit from
serendipitous encounters, there is much less consensus over what precisely
constitutes a prepared mind, with some research suggesting the importance of
openness and others emphasizing the need for deep prior experience in a
particular domain. In this paper, we empirically investigate the role of
serendipity in science by leveraging a policy change that exogenously shifted
the shelving location of journals in university libraries and subsequently
exposed scientists to unsought scientific information. Using large-scale data
on 2.4 million papers published in 9,750 journals by 520,000 scientists at 115
North American research universities, we find that scientists with greater
openness are more likely to benefit from serendipitous encounters. Following
the policy change, these scientists tended to cite less familiar and newer
work, and ultimately published papers that were more innovative. By contrast,
we find little effect on innovativeness for scientists with greater depth of
experience, who, in our sample, tended to cite more familiar and older work
following the policy change.
