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We explore a paradox of collective action and certainty in science wherein the more scientists research together, the less that work contributes to the value of their collective certainty. When scientists address similar problems and share…

Scepticism towards childhood vaccines and genetically modified food has grown despite scientific evidence of their safety. Beliefs about scientific issues are difficult to change because they are entrenched within many related moral…

Many published research results are false, and controversy continues over the roles of replication and publication policy in improving the reliability of research. Addressing these problems is frustrated by the lack of a formal framework…

Similar to how innovations often find success in fields other than their original domains, in this study we explore whether the same holds true for scientific discoveries. We investigate the flow of knowledge across scientific disciplines,…

Modern science is formally structured around scholarly publication, where scientific knowledge is canonized through citation. Precisely how citations are given and accrued can provide information about the value of discovery, the history of…

Citations are commonly held to represent scientific impact. To date, however, there is no empirical evidence in support of this postulate that is central to research assessment exercises and Science of Science studies. Here, we report on…

How does scientific knowledge grow? This question has occupied a central place in the philosophy of science, stimulating heated debates, but yielding no clear consensus. Many explanations can be understood in terms of whether and how they…

Reproducibility, the ability to recompute results, and replicability, the chances other experimenters will achieve a consistent result, are two foundational characteristics of successful scientific research. Consistent findings from…

Uncertainty is an important concept in physics laboratory instruction. However, little work has examined how students reason about uncertainty beyond the introductory (intro) level. In this work we aimed to compare intro and beyond-intro…

The ongoing globalisation of science has undisputedly a major impact on how and where scientific research is being conducted nowadays. Yet, the big picture remains blurred. It is largely unknown where this process is heading, and at which…

With the emergence and rapid proliferation of social media platforms and social networking sites, recent years have witnessed a surge of misinformation spreading in our daily life. Drawing on a large-scale dataset which covers more than…

The diverse views of science of security have opened up several alleys towards applying the methods of science to security. We pursue a different kind of connection between science and security. This paper explores the idea that security is…

Peer review shapes which scientific claims enter the published record, but its internal dynamics are hard to measure at scale because reviewer criticism and author revision are usually embedded in long, unstructured correspondence. Here we…

Poor research design and data analysis encourage false-positive findings. Such poor methods persist despite perennial calls for improvement, suggesting that they result from something more than just misunderstanding. The persistence of poor…

Taking advice from others requires confidence in their competence. This is important for interaction with peers, but also for collaboration with social robots and artificial agents. Nonetheless, we do not always have access to information…

National science systems have become embedded in global science and countries do everything they can to harness global knowledge to national economic needs. However, accessing and using the riches of global knowledge can occur only through…

Inference is the process of using facts we know to learn about facts we do not know. A theory of inference gives assumptions necessary to get from the former to the latter, along with a definition for and summary of the resulting…

The growth of science and technology is a recombinative process, wherein new discoveries and inventions are built from prior knowledge. Yet relatively little is known about the manner in which scientific and technological knowledge develop…

Modern science increasingly relies on ever-growing observational datasets and automated inference pipelines, under the implicit belief that accumulating more data makes scientific conclusions more reliable. Here we show that this belief can…

The spread of disinformation (maliciously spread false information) in online social networks has become an important problem in today's society. Disinformation's spread is facilitated by the fact that individuals often accept false…