Related papers: Evolution and Transformation of Scientific Knowled…
We use an information-theoretic measure of linguistic similarity to investigate the organization and evolution of scientific fields. An analysis of almost 20M papers from the past three decades reveals that the linguistic similarity is…
The evolution of vocabulary in academic publishing is characterized via keyword frequencies recorded the ISI Web of Science citations database. In four distinct case-studies, evolutionary analysis of keyword frequency change through time is…
What happens when a new social convention replaces an old one? While the possible forces favoring norm change - such as institutions or committed activists - have been identified since a long time, little is known about how a population…
Scientific discovery is shaped by scientists' choices and thus by their career patterns. The increasing knowledge required to work at the frontier of science makes it harder for an individual to embark on unexplored paths. Yet…
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,…
Science is built on the scholarly consensus that shifts with time. This raises the question of how new and revolutionary ideas are evaluated and become accepted into the canon of science. Using two recently proposed metrics, we identify…
Understanding cultural phenomena on Social Networks (SNs) and exploiting the implicit knowledge about their members is attracting the interest of different research communities both from the academic and the business side. The community of…
Scientific fields differ in terms of their subject matter, research techniques, collaboration sizes, rates of growth, and so on. We investigate whether common dynamics might lurk beneath these differences, affecting how scientific fields…
It is tempting to treat frequency trends from the Google Books data sets as indicators of the "true" popularity of various words and phrases. Doing so allows us to draw quantitatively strong conclusions about the evolution of cultural…
Philosophers of science have long postulated how collective scientific knowledge grows. Empirical validation has been challenging due to limitations in collecting and systematizing large historical records. Here, we capitalize on the…
A fundamental question in the field of social studies of science is how research fields emerge, grow and decline over time and space. This study confronts this question here by developing an inductive analysis of emerging research fields…
A common theme among the proposed models for network epidemics is the assumption that the propagating object, i.e., a virus or a piece of information, is transferred across the nodes without going through any modification or evolution.…
Complex networks have attracted a great deal of research interest in the last two decades since Watts & Strogatz, Barab\'asi & Albert and Girvan & Newman published their highly-cited seminal papers on small-world networks, on scale-free…
In this paper, we examine how patterns of scientific collaboration contribute to knowledge creation. Recent studies have shown that scientists can benefit from their position within collaborative networks by being able to receive more…
Here I present an investigation on the evolution and use of vocabulary in data science in the last 13 years. Based on a rigorous statistical analysis, a database with 12,787 documents containing the words "data science" in the title,…
Most educational literature on conceptual change concerns the process by which introductory students acquire scientific knowledge. However, with modern developments in science and technology, the social significance of learning successive…
Many communities, including the scientific community, develop implicit writing norms. Understanding them is crucial for effective communication with that community. Writers gradually develop an implicit understanding of norms by reading…
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…
Academic research is driven by several factors causing different disciplines to act as "sources" or "sinks" of knowledge. However, how the flow of authors' research interests -- a proxy of human knowledge -- evolved across time is still…
Many of the essential features of the evolution of scientific research are imprinted in the structure of citation networks. Connections in these networks imply information about the transfer of knowledge among papers, or in other words,…