Related papers: Quantifying the Ease of Scientific Discovery
Fast growing scientific topics have famously been key harbingers of the new frontiers of science, yet, large-scale analyses of their genesis and impact are rare. We investigate one possible factor connected with a topic's extraordinary…
Condensing the work of any academic scientist into a one-dimensional measure of scientific quality is a difficult problem. Here, we employ Bayesian statistics to analyze several different measures of quality. Specifically, we determine each…
A fundamental question in the field of social studies of science is how research fields emerge, grow and decline over time and space. This study confronts this question here by developing an inductive analysis of emerging research fields…
The rapid evolution of artificial intelligence has led to expectations of transformative impact on science, yet current systems remain fundamentally limited in enabling genuine scientific discovery. This perspective contends that progress…
The last few years have seen the proliferation of measures that quantify the scientific output of researches. Yet, these measures focus on productivity, thus fostering the "publish or perish" paradigm. This article proposes a measure that…
Nobel Prizes are commonly seen to be among the most prestigious achievements of our times. Based on mining several million citations, we quantitatively analyze the processes driving paradigm shifts in science. We find that groundbreaking…
The process of discovery in the physical, biological and medical sciences can be painstakingly slow. Most experiments fail, and the time from initiation of research until a new advance reaches commercial production can span 20 years. This…
From more than half a century ago indexing scientific articles has been studied intensively to provide a more efficient data retrieval and to conserve researchers invaluable time. In the last two decades with the emergence of the World Wide…
We develop a method to estimate producers' productivity beliefs when output quantities and input prices are unobservable, and we use it to evaluate the market for science. Our model of researchers' labor supply shows how their willingness…
Innovation is to organizations what evolution is to organisms: it is how organisations adapt to changes in the environment and improve. Governments, institutions and firms that innovate are more likely to prosper and stand the test of time;…
Recent applications of machine learning and statistical inference provide case studies demonstrating how such approaches can accelerate the discovery process in physical chemistry and related fields. Examples discussed in this review…
The logic of abduction involves a collision between deduction and induction, where empirical surprises violate expectations and scientists innovate to resolve them. Here we reformulate abduction as a social process, occurring not only…
A central question in science of science concerns how time affects citations. Despite the long-standing interests and its broad impact, we lack systematic answers to this simple yet fundamental question. By reviewing and classifying prior…
We venture that the long evolution of science may be viewed as unfolding over three blurred epochs. The first epoch spans the slow, haphazard, error-ridden realization of scientific truths along with foundational scientific methods. The…
Our knowledge of the Universe remains discovery-led: in the absence of adequate physics-based theory, interpretation of new results requires a scientific methodology. Commonly, scientific progress in astrophysics is motivated by the…
As modern scientific instruments generate vast amounts of data and the volume of information in the scientific literature continues to grow, machine learning (ML) has become an essential tool for organising, analysing, and interpreting…
Over the last four decades, the way knowledge is created in academia has transformed dramatically: research teams have grown larger, scholars draw from ever-wider pools of prior work, and the most influential discoveries increasingly emerge…
The evolution of scientific fields has been attracting much attention in recent years. One of the key issues in evolution of scientific field is to quantify the dissimilarity between two collections of scientific publications in literature.…
Science of science has become a popular topic that attracts great attentions from the research community. The development of data analytics technologies and the readily available scholarly data enable the exploration of data-driven…
Evolvability is the capacity to evolve. This paper introduces a simple computational model of evolvability and demonstrates that, under certain conditions, evolvability can increase indefinitely, even when there is no direct selection for…