Related papers: Anatomy of Scientific Evolution
We stand at the foot of a significant inflection in the trajectory of scientific discovery. As society continues on its fast-paced digital transformation, so does humankind's collective scientific knowledge and discourse. We now read and…
We attempt to provide a comprehensive model of evolution of science across millennia taking into account the contributions of other intellectual traditions, cultural value system and increasing in sophistication of humans in their study of…
It has long been known that scientific output proceeds on an exponential increase, or more properly, a logistic growth curve. The interplay between effort and discovery is clear, and the nature of the functional form has been thought to be…
Progress in science has advanced the development of human society across history, with dramatic revolutions shaped by information theory, genetic cloning, and artificial intelligence, among the many scientific achievements produced in the…
The evolution of vocabulary in academic publishing is characterized via keyword frequencies recorded the ISI Web of Science citations database. In four distinct case-studies, evolutionary analysis of keyword frequency change through time is…
Scientific information expresses human understanding of nature. This knowledge is largely disseminated in different forms of text, including scientific papers, news articles, and discourse among people on social media. While important for…
We use an information-theoretic measure of linguistic similarity to investigate the organization and evolution of scientific fields. An analysis of almost 20M papers from the past three decades reveals that the linguistic similarity is…
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…
Research on the development of science has focused on the creation of multidisciplinary teams. However, while this coming together of people is symmetrical, the ideas, methods, and vocabulary of science have a directional flow. We present a…
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…
Motivated by the results of recent laboratory experiments (Yoshida et al. Nature, 424, 303-306 (2003)) as well as many earlier field observations that evolutionary changes can take place in ecosystems over relatively short ecological time…
Understanding the changing structure of science over time is essential to elucidating how science evolves. We develop diachronic embeddings of scholarly periodicals to quantify "semantic changes" of periodicals across decades, allowing us…
This study elaborates a text-based metric to quantify the unique position of stylized scientific research, characterized by its innovative integration of diverse knowledge components and potential to pivot established scientific paradigms.…
Evolution has fascinated quantitative and physical scientists for decades: how can the random process of mutation, recombination, and duplication of genetic information generate the diversity of life? What determines the rate of evolution?…
One of the most interesting scientific challenges nowadays deals with the analysis and the understanding of complex networks' dynamics. A major issue is the definition of new frameworks for the exploration of the dynamics at play in real…
With the advent of large multimodal language models, science is now at a threshold of an AI-based technological transformation. An emerging ecosystem of models and tools aims to support researchers throughout the scientific lifecycle,…
Rediscovering a new function for something can be just as important as the discovery itself. In 1982, Stephen Jay Gould and Elisabeth Vrba named this phenomenon Exaptation to describe a radical shift in the function of a specific trait…
It is tempting to treat frequency trends from the Google Books data sets as indicators of the "true" popularity of various words and phrases. Doing so allows us to draw quantitatively strong conclusions about the evolution of cultural…
The problem of identifying common concepts in the sciences and deciding when new ideas have emerged is an open one. Metascience researchers have sought to formalize principles underlying stages in the life-cycle of scientific research,…
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…