Related papers: The evolution of interdisciplinarity in physics re…
The distinction between sciences is becoming increasingly more artificial -- an approach from one area can be easily applied to the other. More exciting research nowadays is happening perhaps at the interfaces of disciplines like Physics,…
Despite the apparent cross-disciplinary interactions among scientific fields, a formal description of their evolution is lacking. Here we describe a novel approach to study the dynamics and evolution of scientific fields using a…
This article addresses broad trends in interdisciplinary research in physics where interactions with colleagues in fields such as computer science, ecology, or economics can often be derailed by unintentional clashes of methodologies and…
Although interdisciplinarity is often touted as a necessity for modern research, the evidence on the relative impact of sectorial versus to interdisciplinary science is qualitative at best. In this paper we leverage the bibliographic data…
The exchange of knowledge across different areas and disciplines plays a key role in the process of knowledge creation, and can stimulate innovation and the emergence of new fields. We develop here a quantitative framework to extract…
Recent decades have seen a rise in the use of physics methods to study different societal phenomena. This development has been due to physicists venturing outside of their traditional domains of interest, but also due to scientists from…
Physics is one of the most successful endeavors in science. Being a prototypic big science it also reflects the growing tendency for scientific collaborations. Utilizing 250,000 papers from ArXiv.org a prepublishing platform prevalent in…
Nowadays, computer science (CS) has emerged as a dominant force in numerous research areas both within and beyond its own discipline. However, despite its significant impact on scholarly space, only a limited number of studies have been…
Using data from co-authorships at the international level in all fields of science in 1990 and 2000, and within six case studies at the sub-field level in 2000, different explanations for the growth of international collaboration in science…
While the ``hierarchy of science'' has been widely analysed, there is no corresponding study of the status of subfields within a given scientific field. We use bibliometric data to show that subfields of mathematics have a different…
The tremendous advances in computer science in the last few decades have provided the platform to address and solve complex problems using interdisciplinary research. In this paper, we investigate how the extent of interdisciplinarity in…
The practice of scientific research is often thought of as individuals and small teams striving for disciplinary advances. Yet as a whole, this endeavor more closely resembles a complex system of natural computation, in which information is…
Over the past decades, the diversity of areas explored by physicists has exploded, encompassing new topics from biophysics and chemical physics to network science. However, it is unclear how these new subfields emerged from the traditional…
We investigate the community structure of physics subfields in the citation network of all Physical Review publications between 1893 and August 2007. We focus on well-cited publications (those receiving more than 100 citations), and apply…
Physicists study a wide variety of phenomena creating new interdisciplinary research fields by applying theories and methods originally developed in physics in order to solve problems in economics, social science, biology, medicine,…
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…
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…
Scientific knowledge has become central to policymaking as societies face challenges related to technological change, climate risk, and public health. Despite the growing emphasis on evidence-based policy, a systematic understanding of how…
One overarching objective of science is to further our understanding of the universe, from its early stages to its current state and future evolution. This depends on gaining insight on the universe's most macroscopic components, for…
Defining interdisciplinary physics today requires first a reformulation of what is physics today, which in turn calls for clarifying what makes a physicist. This assessment results from my forty year journey arguing and fighting to build…