Related papers: Quantifying patterns of research interest evolutio…
Understanding the mechanisms underlying the formation of cultural traits, such as preferences, opinions and beliefs is an open challenge. Trait formation is intimately connected to cultural dynamics, which has been the focus of a variety of…
As input data distributions evolve, the predictive performance of machine learning models tends to deteriorate. In practice, new input data tend to come without target labels. Then, state-of-the-art techniques model input data distributions…
Researchers, editors, educators and publishers need to understand the mix of research methods used in their field to guide decision making, with a current concern being that qualitative research is threatened by big data. Although there…
Science is a growing system, exhibiting ~4% annual growth in publications and ~1.8% annual growth in the number of references per publication. Combined these trends correspond to a 12-year doubling period in the total supply of references,…
Search in an environment with an uncertain distribution of resources involves a trade-off between exploitation of past discoveries and further exploration. This extends to information foraging, where a knowledge-seeker shifts between…
A common consensus in the literature is that the citation profile of published articles in general follows a universal pattern - an initial growth in the number of citations within the first two to three years after publication followed by…
We study the statistics of ecosystems with a variable number of co-evolving species. The species interact in two ways: by prey-predator relationships and by direct competition with similar kinds. The interaction coefficients change slowly…
Quantifying animal interactions is crucial for understanding various ecological processes, including social community structures, predator-prey dynamics, spreading of pathogens and information. Despite the ubiquity of interaction processes…
Researchers often frame quantitative research as objective, but every step in data collection and analysis can bias findings in often unexamined ways. In this investigation, we examined how the process of selecting variables to include in…
How can we draw trustworthy scientific conclusions? One criterion is that a study can be replicated by independent teams. While replication is critically important, it is arguably insufficient. If a study is biased for some reason and other…
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…
Machine learning with application to questions in the physical sciences has become a widely used tool, successfully applied to classification, regression and optimization tasks in many areas. Research focus mostly lies in improving the…
Phylodynamics seeks to estimate effective population size fluctuations from molecular sequences of individuals sampled from a population of interest. One way to accomplish this task formulates an observed sequence data likelihood exploiting…
The exponentially growing number of scientific papers stimulates a discussion on the interplay between quantity and quality in science. In particular, one may wonder which publication strategy may offer more chances of success: publishing…
Species sampling processes have long served as the fundamental framework for modeling random discrete distributions and exchangeable sequences. However, data arising from distinct but related sources require a broader notion of…
The design of research grants has been hypothesized to be a useful tool for influencing researchers and their science. We test this by conducting two thought experiments in a nationally representative survey of academic researchers. First,…
Taylor's Law (TL) relates the variance to the mean of a random variable via power law. In ecology it applies to populationsand it is a common empirical pattern shared among different ecosystems. Measurements give power law exponent to be…
Genetic information and environmental factors determine the path of an individuals life and therefore, the evolution of its entire species. We have succeeded in proposing and studying a model that captures this idea. In our model, a…
Pervasive natural selection can strongly influence observed patterns of genetic variation, but these effects remain poorly understood when multiple selected variants segregate in nearby regions of the genome. Classical population genetics…
The coupling between evolutionary and ecological changes (eco-evolutionary dynamics) has been shown to be relevant among diverse species, and is also of interest outside of ecology, i.e. in cancer evolution. These dynamics play an important…