Related papers: Quantifying the Ease of Scientific Discovery
The way science is currently practiced shows conclusions but hides how they were reached. Researchers work privately, polish their results, publish a finished paper, and defend it. Errors are punished by retraction rather than corrected by…
Progress in science has advanced the development of human society across history, with dramatic revolutions shaped by information theory, genetic cloning, and artificial intelligence, among the many scientific achievements produced in the…
The dream of building machines that can do science has inspired scientists for decades. Remarkable advances have been made recently; however, we are still far from achieving this goal. In this paper, we focus on the scientific discovery…
National science systems have become embedded in global science and countries do everything they can to harness global knowledge to national economic needs. However, accessing and using the riches of global knowledge can occur only through…
We discuss, at the macro-level of nations, the contribution of research funding and rate of international collaboration to research performance, with important implications for the science of science policy. In particular, we…
Understanding how institutional changes within academia may affect the overall potential of science requires a better quantitative representation of how careers evolve over time. Since knowledge spillovers, cumulative advantage,…
From small steps to great leaps, metaphors of spatial mobility abound to describe discovery processes. Here, we ground these ideas in formal terms by systematically studying scientific knowledge mobility patterns. We use low-dimensional…
The development of inventions is theorized as a process of searching and recombining existing knowledge components. Previous studies under this theory have examined myriad characteristics of recombined knowledge and their performance…
Using large-scale citation data and a breakthrough metric, the study systematically evaluates the inevitability of scientific breakthroughs. We find that scientific breakthroughs emerge as multiple discoveries rather than singular events.…
In this paper we study research trends in condensed matter physics. Trends are analyzed by means of the the number of publications in the different sub-fields as function of the years. We found that many research topics have a similar…
The ongoing globalisation of science has undisputedly a major impact on how and where scientific research is being conducted nowadays. Yet, the big picture remains blurred. It is largely unknown where this process is heading, and at which…
Emergence is a profound subject that straddles many scientific disciplines, including the formation of galaxies and how consciousness arises from the collective activity of neurons. Despite the broad interest that exists on this concept,…
Knowledge amount is an integral indicator of the development of society. Humanity produces knowledge in response to challenges from nature and society. Knowledge production depends on population size and human productivity. Productivity is…
Data is a critical element in any discovery process. In the last decades, we observed exponential growth in the volume of available data and the technology to manipulate it. However, data is only practical when one can structure it for a…
Understanding the laws that govern a phenomenon is the core of scientific progress. This is especially true when the goal is to model the interplay between different aspects in a causal fashion. Indeed, causal inference itself is…
In this work we dig into the process of scientific discovery by looking at a yet unexploited source of information: Polymath projects. Polymath projects are an original attempt to collectively solve mathematical problems in an online…
Ecology studies biodiversity in its variety and complexity. It describes how species distribute and perform in response to environmental changes. Ecological processes and structures are highly complex and adaptive. In order to quantify…
We show that the space in which scientific, technological and economic developments interplay with each other can be mathematically shaped using pioneering multilayer network and complexity techniques. We build the tri-layered network of…
The paper surveys automated scientific discovery, from equation discovery and symbolic regression to autonomous discovery systems and agents. It discusses the individual approaches from a "big picture" perspective and in context, but also…
Theories of scientific and technological change view discovery and invention as endogenous processes, wherein prior accumulated knowledge enables future progress by allowing researchers to, in Newton's words, "stand on the shoulders of…