Related papers: Anatomy of Scientific Evolution
One of the fundamental questions in science is how scientific disciplines evolve and sustain progress in society. No studies to date allows us to explain the endogenous processes that support the evolution of scientific disciplines and…
Biological evolution provides a creative fount of complex and subtle adaptations, often surprising the scientists who discover them. However, because evolution is an algorithmic process that transcends the substrate in which it occurs,…
The birth and decline of disciplines are critical to science and society. However, no quantitative model to date allows us to validate competing theories of whether the emergence of scientific disciplines drives or follows the formation of…
This review paper explores the evolution of discussions about "long-tail" scientific data in the scholarly literature. The "long-tail" concept, originally used to explain trends in digital consumer goods, was first applied to scientific…
Growth of science is a prevalent issue in science of science studies. In recent years, two new bibliographic databases have been introduced which can be used to study growth processes in science from centuries back: Dimensions from Digital…
We examine the feasibility of predicting and subsequently managing the future evolution of a Complex Adaptive System. Our archetypal system mimics a competitive population of mechanical, biological, informational or human objects. We show…
Whereas the research program of the measurement of scientific communications emerged in a context where the delineations among academia, government, and industry were institutionalized, the systemic development of these relations during 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…
What happens when a new social convention replaces an old one? While the possible forces favoring norm change - such as institutions or committed activists - have been identified since a long time, little is known about how a population…
A vast array of transformative technologies developed over the past decade has enabled measurement and perturbation at ever increasing scale, yet our understanding of many systems remains limited by experimental capacity. Overcoming this…
Theories of scientific and technological change view discovery and invention as endogenous processes, wherein prior accumulated knowledge enables future progress by allowing researchers to, in Newton's words, "stand on the shoulders of…
A fundamental problem in technological studies is how to measure the evolution of technology. The literature has suggested several approaches to measuring the level of technology (or state-of-the-art) and changes in technology. However, the…
Science of science has become a popular topic that attracts great attentions from the research community. The development of data analytics technologies and the readily available scholarly data enable the exploration of data-driven…
Science advances by pushing the boundaries of the adjacent possible. While the global scientific enterprise grows at an exponential pace, at the mesoscopic level the exploration and exploitation of research ideas is reflected through the…
The gap in statistics between multi-variate and time-series analysis can be bridged by using entropy statistics and recent developments in multi-dimensional scaling. For explaining the evolution of the sciences as non-linear dynamics, the…
The amount of scholarly data has been increasing dramatically over the last years. For newcomers to a particular science domain (e.g., IR, physics, NLP) it is often difficult to spot larger trends and to position the latest research in the…
Scientific discovery is a complex cognitive process that has driven human knowledge and technological progress for centuries. While artificial intelligence (AI) has made significant advances in automating aspects of scientific reasoning,…
The emergence of "big data" offers unprecedented opportunities for not only accelerating scientific advances but also enabling new modes of discovery. Scientific progress in many disciplines is increasingly enabled by our ability to examine…
Our quantitative understanding of how scientists choose and shift their research focus over time is highly consequential, because it affects the ways in which scientists are trained, science is funded, knowledge is organized and discovered,…
A fundamental question in the field of social studies of science is how research fields emerge, grow and decline over time and space. This study confronts this question here by developing an inductive analysis of emerging research fields…