Related papers: Is modern science evolving in the wrong direction?
Science is built on the scholarly consensus that shifts with time. This raises the question of how new and revolutionary ideas are evaluated and become accepted into the canon of science. Using two recently proposed metrics, we identify…
Language is a major source of systemic inequities in science, particularly among scholars whose first language is not English. Studies have examined scientists' linguistic practices in specific contexts; few, however, have provided a global…
We discuss the problems of consensus and unity in science. The natural sciences seem to contrast with many other areas of endeavor in that a high level of consensus seems to exist in them. However, a careful analysis of the structure of…
Scientific collaboration networks are an important component of scientific output and contribute significantly to expanding our knowledge and to the economy and gross domestic product of nations. Here we examine a dataset from the Mendeley…
Research projects are primarily collaborative in nature through internal and external partnerships, but what role does funding play in their formation? Here, we examined over 43,000 funded projects in the past three decades, enabling us to…
How does scientific knowledge grow? This question has occupied a central place in the philosophy of science, stimulating heated debates, but yielding no clear consensus. Many explanations can be understood in terms of whether and how they…
The shift from individual effort to collaborative output has benefited science, with scientific work pursued collaboratively having increasingly led to more highly impactful research than that pursued individually. However, understanding of…
This paper applies a new model and analytical tool to measure and study contemporary globalization processes in collaborative science - a world in which scientists, scholars, technicians and engineers interact within a 'grid' of…
The shift towards the use of electronic media in scholarly communication appears to be an inescapable imperative. However, these shifts are uneven, both with respect to field and with respect to the form of communication. Different…
We perform the analysis of scientific collaboration at the level of universities. The scope of this study is to answer two fundamental questions: (i) can one indicate a category (i.e., a scientific discipline) that has the greatest impact…
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…
Science, being a social enterprise, is subject to fragmentation into groups that focus on specialized areas or topics. Often new advances occur through cross-fertilization of ideas between sub-fields that otherwise have little overlap as…
The past few centuries have witnessed a dramatic growth in scientific and technological knowledge. However, the nature of that growth - whether exponential or otherwise - remains controversial, perhaps partly due to the lack of quantitative…
Humanities have convincingly argued that they need transnational research opportunities and through the digital transformation of their disciplines also have the means to proceed with it on an up to now unknown scale. The digital…
Astronomy has played a major part in the development of civilisations, not only through conceptual developments, but most importantly through the very practical gains obtained through the observation of Sun, Moon planets and stars. Space…
The democracy-science relationship has traditionally been examined through philosophical conjecture and single country case studies. There remains limited global scale empirical research on the topic. This study explores country level…
With rising life expectancies around the world and an older scientific workforce than ever before, what does aging mean for individual scientists, and what do aging scientists mean for scientific progress as a whole? Here we examine how…
Academic research is driven by several factors causing different disciplines to act as "sources" or "sinks" of knowledge. However, how the flow of authors' research interests -- a proxy of human knowledge -- evolved across time is still…
Geopolitical tensions increasingly reshape the structure and openness of global science, yet we still lack a clear understanding of how successfully scientists adapt their work under such pressures. Using millions of funding and publication…
In the field of artificial intelligence (AI) research, there seems to be a rapprochement between academics and industrial forces. The aim of this study is to assess whether and to what extent industrial domination in the field as well as…