Related papers: Social Dynamics of Science
In this work we review some recent development in the mathematical modelling of quantitative sociology by means of statistical mechanics. After a short pedagogical introduction to static and dynamic properties of many body systems, we…
Statistical physics has proven to be a very fruitful framework to describe phenomena outside the realm of traditional physics. The last years have witnessed the attempt by physicists to study collective phenomena emerging from the…
Cooperation is a widespread natural phenomenon yet current evolutionary thinking is dominated by the paradigm of selfish competition. Recent advanced in many fronts of Biology and Non-linear Physics are helping to bring cooperation to its…
Scientific literature till date can be thought of as a partially revealed landscape, where scholars continue to unveil hidden knowledge by exploring novel research topics. How do scholars explore the scientific landscape , i.e., choose…
The goal of Science is to understand phenomena and systems in order to predict their development and gain control over them. In the scientific process of knowledge elaboration, a crucial role is played by models which, in the language of…
We survey some recent developments on the mathematical modeling of opinion dynamics. After an introduction on opinion modeling through interacting multi-agent systems described by partial differential equations of kinetic type, we focus our…
Representing social systems as networks, starting from the interactions between individuals, sheds light on the mechanisms governing their dynamics. However, networks encode only pairwise interactions, while most social interactions occur…
Success-driven social learning, in which individuals preferentially adopt the ideas and methods that appear most successful, is a foundational principle of collective behavior across systems ranging from ant colonies to scientific…
For a variety of inter-related cultural, organizational, and political reasons, progress in climate science and the actual solution of scientific problems in this field have moved at a much slower rate than would normally be possible. Not…
An increased interdisciplinarity in science projects has been highlighted as crucial to tackle complex real-world challenges, but also as beneficial for the development of disciplines themselves. This paper introduces a parcimonious…
The co-authorship network of scientists represents a prototype of complex evolving networks. By mapping the electronic database containing all relevant journals in mathematics and neuro-science for an eight-year period (1991-98), we infer…
Cities are systems with a large number of constituents and agents interacting with each other and can be considered as emblematic of complex systems. Modeling these systems is a real challenge and triggered the interest of many disciplines…
Scientific social stratification is a classic theme in the sociology of science. The deep integration of social media has bridged the gap between scientometrics and sociology of science. This study comprehensively analyzes the impact of…
Academic research groups are treated as complex systems and their cooperative behaviour is analysed from a mathematical and statistical viewpoint. Contrary to the naive expectation that the quality of a research group is simply given by the…
Social evolutionary theory seeks to explain increases in the scale and complexity of human societies, from origins to present. Over the course of the twentieth century, social evolutionary theory largely fell out of favor as a way of…
A theory of citations should not consider cited and/or citing agents as its sole subject of study. One is able to study also the dynamics in the networks of communications. While communicating agents (e.g., authors, laboratories, journals)…
Can we describe social systems quantitatively and predictively, when we know all the actions, interactions, and states of individuals? We interpret human societies as co-evolutionary systems of individuals and their interactions. Based on…
The complexity of emergent wicked problems, such as climate change, culminates in a reformulation of how we think about society and mobilize scientists from various disciplines to seek solutions and perspectives on the problem. From an…
This paper proposes a systems approach to social sciences based on mathematical framework derived from a generalization of the mathematical kinetic theory and on theoretical tools of game theory. Social systems are modeled as a living…
In some systems, the behavior of the constituent units can create a `context' that modifies the direct interactions among them. This mechanism of indirect modification inspired us to develop a minimal model of context-dependent spreading.…