“Scientific creativity is the ability of conducting creative science experiments and finding out and solving creative science problems and science activities” (Raj & Saxena, 2016; p. 1122). It is seen as a key factor in meeting the many challenges of our time, such as climate change, medical care, belief in conspiracies, or even global pandemics. This need for innovation is offset by another phenomenon: Since the late 1940s, groundbreaking discoveries in science have been on the decline. This means that scientific articles and even patents are much less likely to be genuine innovations, but are often merely an adaptation or improvement of existing achievements. In this study, we investigate several personality factors that predict scientific creativity in university students using our novel scientific creativity task. In this task, participants from the interdisciplinary field of cognitive science are asked to prepare research proposals for investigating an innovative question from their specific fields of study. The quality of the research proposals is classified by experts from the respective disciplines as well as participants themselves using a structured rating procedure. We further measure fluid intelligence, general creative potential, as well as demographic data. Our study thus serves to establish a measurement for scientific creativity suitable for the academic context, as well as an indicator for the extent to which the measured factors are suitable predictors for scientific creativity in university students.

Raj, H., & Saxena, D. R. (2016). Scientific creativity: A review of researches. European Academic Research, 4(2), 1122-1138.