Related papers: Quantifying exaptation in scientific evolution
Novelty, akin to gene mutation in evolution, opens possibilities for scholarly advancement. Although peer review remains the gold standard for evaluating novelty in scholarly communication and resource allocation, the vast volume of…
Citation networks have fed numerous works in scientific evaluation, science mapping (and more recently large-scale network studies) for decades. The variety of citation behavior across scientific fields is both a research topic in sociology…
Scientific discovery is a cumulative process and requires new ideas to be situated within an ever-expanding landscape of existing knowledge. An emerging and critical challenge is how to identify conceptually relevant prior work from rapidly…
The origin of cellular life can be described in terms of the transition from inorganic matter: solids, liquids and gases, to the emergence of cooperative assemblies of organic matter, DNA and proteins,capable of replication and metabolism.…
This article is a primer on concept extrapolation - the ability to take a concept, a feature, or a goal that is defined in one context and extrapolate it safely to a more general context. Concept extrapolation aims to solve model…
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…
Entropy can signify different things: For instance, heat transfer in thermodynamics or a measure of information in data analysis. Many entropies have been introduced and it can be difficult to ascertain their different importance and…
Emerging data analysis involves the ingestion and exploration of new data sets, application of complex functions, and frequent query revisions based on observing prior query answers. We call this new type of analysis evolutionary analytics…
Understanding the innovation process, that is the underlying mechanisms through which novelties emerge, diffuse and trigger further novelties is undoubtedly of fundamental importance in many areas (biology, linguistics, social science and…
In this contribution to the proceedings of the 182nd Nobel Symposium, I reflect on the concept of "discovery" as it is used by physicists and astronomers. In particular, I comment on how the scientific community distinguishes discoveries…
Conceptualization, a fundamental element of human cognition, plays a pivotal role in human generalizable reasoning. Generally speaking, it refers to the process of sequentially abstracting specific instances into higher-level concepts and…
Recently, a new measure of information called extropy has been introduced by Lad, Sanfilippo and Agr\`o as the dual version of Shannon entropy. In the literature, Tsallis introduced a measure for a discrete random variable, named Tsallis…
Cosmologists wish to explain how our Universe, in all its complexity, could ever have come about. For that, we assess the number of states in our Universe now. This plays the role of entropy in thermodynamics of the Universe, and reveals…
Epochal dynamics, in which long periods of stasis in population fitness are punctuated by sudden innovations, is a common behavior in both natural and artificial evolutionary processes. We use a recent quantitative mathematical analysis of…
Machine learning methods have been remarkably successful for a wide range of application areas in the extraction of essential information from data. An exciting and relatively recent development is the uptake of machine learning in the…
A mechanism is proposed that allows to interpret the temporal evolution of a physical system as a result of the inability of an observer to record its whole state and a simple example is given. It is based on a review of the concepts of…
The evolution of named entities affects exploration and retrieval tasks in digital libraries. An information retrieval system that is aware of name changes can actively support users in finding former occurrences of evolved entities.…
A simple model of macroevolution is proposed exhibiting both the property of punctuated equilibrium and the dynamics of potentialities for different species to evolve towards increasingly higher complexity. It is based on the phenomenon of…
Breakthrough discoveries and inventions involve unexpected combinations of contents including problems, methods, and natural entities, and also diverse contexts such as journals, subfields, and conferences. Drawing on data from tens of…
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…