The Sharply Decreasing Disruptiveness of HCI
Zhilong Chen, Yong Li · 2025
How creative is HCI research?Although creativity has been a notable theme in HCI, the landscape of the creativity of HCI research itself remains unclear.In this paper, we address this by measuring the disruptiveness of HCI research, one important dimension distinguishing the level of creativity, through a large-scale datadriven bibliometric analysis.By quantitatively tracing its evolution over the past 40 years, we find that the disruptiveness of HCI is decreasing sharply, even at a faster speed than the global average across all fields.We characterize the patterns shown by the themes, knowledge use, and authorship of disruptive papers in HCI, and identify how they associate with disruptiveness, e.g., the positive relationship between author freshness and disruptiveness.Based on our results, we discuss practical implications to improve and secure disruptiveness and creativity in HCI.