Disruptive content, cross agglomeration interaction, and agglomeration replacement: Does cohesion foster strength?

•This study provides a quantitative thought and methodology for disruptive/consolidative knowledge content.•We use an overlapping community detection algorithm to explore the particular type of scholars within the agglomeration.•OLS stepwise regression analysis is used to quantify the impact of agglomeration attributes on disruptive/consolidative knowledge innovation capabilities.•Mediation effects test is used to develop deeper into the inherent transmission relationship between agglomeration attributes and knowledge innovation capabilities. A trend in the academic field is agglomerations among scholars to generate knowledge with a disruptive influence on science and technology; however, the benefits have not been fully substantiated. This paper analyzes over 660,000 papers on artificial intelligence published from 1961 to 2023. We propose a method to calculate the innovative capacity of disruptive knowledge based on the similarity of historical, current, and future keywords, finding that scholars who commence their scientific endeavors earlier possess a heightened capability for disruptive knowledge innovation as Dkc index. The analysis reveals that multiagglomeration scholars have the highest average number of publications and citations, followed by agglomeration-flow scholars. Moreover, a larger agglomeration results in a lower ability to disrupt and consolidate knowledge innovation. Multiagglomeration and agglomeration-flow scholars harm disruptive/consolidative innovations. However, as the agglomeration effect intensifies, these two types of scholars from the disruptive perspective and multiagglomeration scholars from the consolidation perspective have a diminishing marginal effect on innovation capacity. The agglomeration size acts as a partial intermediary in the Multi→Size→Dkc index from the dual perspective and as a full mediator in the Flow→Size→Dkc index from the disruptive perspective, but only with a direct effect from the consolidative perspective.