Related papers: Anatomy of Scientific Evolution
The development of inventions is theorized as a process of searching and recombining existing knowledge components. Previous studies under this theory have examined myriad characteristics of recombined knowledge and their performance…
Culture evolves, not just in the trivial sense that cultures change over time, but also in the strong sense that such change is governed by Darwinian principles. Both biological and cultural evolution are essentially cumulative selection…
How do shared conventions emerge in complex decentralized social systems? This question engages fields as diverse as linguistics, sociology and cognitive science. Previous empirical attempts to solve this puzzle all presuppose that formal…
We are facing a real challenge when coping with the continuous acceleration of scientific production and the increasingly changing nature of science. In this article, we extend the classical framework of co-word analysis to the study of…
Social norms and conventions are commonly accepted and adopted behaviors and practices within a social group that guide interactions -- e.g., how to spell a word or how to greet people -- and are central to a group's culture and identity.…
Nature's many varied complex systems (including galaxies, stars, planets, life, and society) are islands of order within the increasingly disordered universe. All organized systems are subject to physical, biological or cultural evolution,…
Despite persistent efforts in revealing the temporal patterns in scientific careers, little attention has been paid to the spatial patterns of scientific activities in the knowledge space. Here, drawing on millions of papers in six…
Generative AI models, including large language models and multimodal models that include text and other media, are on the cusp of transforming many aspects of modern life, including entertainment, education, civic life, the arts, and a…
The explosive growth of scientists, scientific journals, articles and findings in recent years exponentially increases the difficulty scientists face in navigating prior knowledge. This challenge is exacerbated by uncertainty about the…
We introduce a dataset for studying the evolution of words, constructed from WordNet and the Google Books Ngram Corpus. The dataset tracks the evolution of 4,000 synonym sets (synsets), containing 9,000 English words, from 1800 AD to 2000…
Science progresses by building upon previous discoveries. It is commonly believed that the impact of scientific papers, as measured by citations, is positively correlated with the impact of past discoveries built upon. However, analyzing…
Continuous adaptation allows survival in an ever-changing world. Adjustments in the synaptic coupling strength between neurons are essential for this capability, setting us apart from simpler, hard-wired organisms. How these changes can be…
Many studies in information science have looked at the growth of science. In this study, we re-examine the question of the growth of science. To do this we (i) use current data up to publication year 2012 and (ii) analyse it across all…
Are there hidden dynamical common patterns in the evolution of social and cultural history? While the growing availability of digitized social data invites us to answer this question, prevailing quantitative methods often rely on…
Scientific and technological frontiers advance through punctuated dynamics, yet the principles governing these dynamics remain poorly understood. Here we collect and analyze datasets tracking the evolution of frontiers across 9 different…
In recent years, with the increase of social investment in scientific research, the number of research results in various fields has increased significantly. Cross-disciplinary research results have gradually become an emerging frontier…
Over the past two decades, the field of high-dimensional statistics has experienced substantial progress, driven largely by technological advances that have dramatically reduced the cost and effort for data collection and storage across a…
Determining how scientific achievements influence the subsequent process of knowledge creation is a fundamental step in order to build a unified ecosystem for studying the dynamics of innovation and competitiveness. Relying separately on…
The advancement of science as outlined by Popper and Kuhn is largely qualitative, but with bibliometric data it is possible and desirable to develop a quantitative picture of scientific progress. Furthermore it is also important to allocate…
The continuous interest in the social network area contributes to the fast development of this field. The new possibilities of obtaining and storing data facilitate deeper analysis of the entire social network, extracted social groups and…