Idea Twins: Simultaneous Discoveries as a Research Tool

Over half a century after Merton’s (1963) description of simultaneous discoveries “as a strategic research site” for social science, they are hardly ever studied. This paper illustrates the potential of this phenomenon as a research tool. First, the author describes their vast theoretical potential for strategy and innovation research and review prior works on the topic. Second, he describes a new method that generates lists of recent simultaneous discoveries in science systematically and automatically using openly available sources. Third, the author makes the resulting dataset available for anyone to use.