Related papers: Quantifying the Ease of Scientific Discovery
Reproducibility is an important feature of science; experiments are retested, and analyses are repeated. Trust in the findings increases when consistent results are achieved. Despite the importance of reproducibility, significant work is…
A novel picture of the relative positions of countries in the world of science is offered through application of a two-dimensional mapping method which is based on quantity and quality indicators of the scientific production as…
Evolution is the fundamental physical process that gives rise to biological phenomena. Yet it is widely treated as a subset of population genetics, and thus its scope is artificially limited. As a result, the key issues of how rapidly…
Using ideas and tools of complexity science we design a holistic measure of \textit{Scientific Fitness}, encompassing the scientific knowledge, capabilities and competitiveness of a research system. We characterize the temporal dynamics of…
Science is a constructed narrative of the natural world based on information gathering and its subsequent analysis. In this essay, we develop a novel approach to the epistemic foundations of the scientific narrative, as based on our…
Redundancy of experimental data is the basic statistic from which the complexity of a natural phenomenon and the proper number of experiments needed for its exploration can be estimated. The redundancy is expressed by the entropy of…
This study investigates entropy's potential for analyzing scientific research patterns across disciplines. Originating from thermodynamics, entropy now measures uncertainty and diversity in information systems. We examine Shannon Entropy,…
The scientific method is the cornerstone of human progress across all branches of the natural and applied sciences, from understanding the human body to explaining how the universe works. The scientific method is based on identifying…
Data science requires time-consuming iterative manual activities. In particular, activities such as data selection, preprocessing, transformation, and mining, highly depend on iterative trial-and-error processes that could be sped-up…
Scientific knowledge is constantly subject to a variety of changes due to new discoveries, alternative interpretations, and fresh perspectives. Understanding uncertainties associated with various stages of scientific inquiries is an…
Scientific discovery concerns finding patterns in data and creating insightful hypotheses that explain these patterns. Traditionally, this process required human ingenuity, but with the galloping advances in artificial intelligence (AI) it…
The field of astronomy has arrived at a turning point in terms of size and complexity of both datasets and scientific collaboration. Commensurately, algorithms and statistical models have begun to adapt --- e.g., via the onset of artificial…
If scientific discovery is one of the main driving forces of human progress, insight is the fuel for the engine, which has long attracted behavior-level research to understand and model its underlying cognitive process. However, current…
Scientific discovery is a cumulative process and requires new ideas to be situated within an ever-expanding landscape of existing knowledge. An emerging and critical challenge is how to identify conceptually relevant prior work from rapidly…
The rapid rise of international collaboration over the past three decades, demonstrated in coauthorship of scientific articles, raises the question of whether countries benefit from cooperative science and how this might be measured. We…
What factors affect a scientist's choice of research problem? Qualitative research in the history, philosophy, and sociology of science suggests that this choice is shaped by an "essential tension" between the professional demand for…
Science laboratory automation enables accelerated discovery in life sciences and materials. However, it requires interdisciplinary collaboration to address challenges such as robust and flexible autonomy, reproducibility, throughput,…
Exploration has been a crucial part of reinforcement learning, yet several important questions concerning exploration efficiency are still not answered satisfactorily by existing analytical frameworks. These questions include exploration…
Recent research\cite{fort} has shown that in the 20th century there is an exponential growth of the number of published scientific papers, but new ideas has only a linear growth with time. The 19th and the first half of the 20th century saw…
Scholars have long hypothesized that democratic forms of government are more compatible with scientific advancement. However, empirical analysis testing the democracy-science compatibility hypothesis remains underdeveloped. This article…