Related papers: Taking census of physics
Increasing numbers of physicists engage in research activities that address biological questions from physics perspectives or strive to develop physics insights from active biological processes. The on-going development and success of such…
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…
Statistical physics has proven to be a very fruitful framework to describe phenomena outside the realm of traditional physics. The last years have witnessed the attempt by physicists to study collective phenomena emerging from the…
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 distinction between sciences is becoming increasingly more artificial -- an approach from one area can be easily applied to the other. More exciting research nowadays is happening perhaps at the interfaces of disciplines like Physics,…
Defining interdisciplinary physics today requires first a reformulation of what is physics today, which in turn calls for clarifying what makes a physicist. This assessment results from my forty year journey arguing and fighting to build…
Is physics education research based on a representative sample of students? To answer this question we skimmed physics education research papers from three journals for the years 1970 - 2015 looking for the number of research subjects, the…
Physics Education Research frequently investigates what students studying physics do on small time scales (e.g. single courses, observations within single courses), or post-education time scales (e.g., what jobs do physics majors get?) but…
Collaboration networks evolve throughout academic careers, yet few studies systematically examine how these network dynamics relate to long-term career success and mobility. Analysing 35,708 physicists' careers spanning at least 15 years,…
This study aims to understand how undergraduate physics majors develop an interest in specific subfields. We examine interest formation through the lens of Social Cognitive Career Theory (SCCT) by exploring four key SCCT constructs:…
Physicists study a wide variety of phenomena creating new interdisciplinary research fields by applying theories and methods originally developed in physics in order to solve problems in economics, social science, biology, medicine,…
Outlooks of particle physics researchers on their careers and the general challenges in establishing their careers over different career stages are surveyed using a questionnaire distributed to participants in an ERC-funded research…
The exchange of knowledge across different areas and disciplines plays a key role in the process of knowledge creation, and can stimulate innovation and the emergence of new fields. We develop here a quantitative framework to extract…
In this study, the global scientific workforce is explored through large-scale, generational, cross-sectional, and longitudinal approaches. We examine 4.3 million nonoccasional scientists from 38 OECD countries publishing in 1990-2021. Our…
Physicists and physics students have been studied with respect to the variation in ways they expound on their topic of research and a physics problem, respectively. A phenomenographic approach has been employed; six fourth-year physics…
In the book The Essential Tension Thomas Kuhn described the conflict between tradition and innovation in scientific research --i.e., the desire to explore new promising areas, counterposed to the need to capitalize on the work done in the…
Socio-economic inequalities are manifested in different aspects of our social life. We discuss various aspects, beginning with the evolutionary and historical origins, and discussing the major issues from the social and economic point of…
Social physics is an active and diverse field in which many scientists with formal training in physics study a broad class of complex social phenomena. Social physics investigates societal problems but most often does not count on the…
This study was investigated to understand the in-depth features and processes of physicists' scientific inquiries. At first, research motives were investigated by interviewing six physicists who were prominent worldwide. As a result, three…
Econophysics embodies the recent upsurge of interest by physicists into financial economics, driven by the availability of large amount of data, job shortage in physics and the possibility of applying many-body techniques developed in…