Related papers: A Quest for Knowledge
An increase in the novelty of news predicts negative stock market returns and negative macroeconomic outcomes over the next year. We quantify news novelty - changes in the distribution of news text - through an entropy measure, calculated…
Innovation is fundamental for development and provides a competitive advantage for societies. It is the process of creating more complex technologies, ideas, or protocols from existing ones. While innovation may be created by single agents…
Nobel Prizes are commonly seen to be among the most prestigious achievements of our times. Based on mining several million citations, we quantitatively analyze the processes driving paradigm shifts in science. We find that groundbreaking…
It has been suggested that innovations occur mainly by combination: the more inventions accumulate, the higher the probability that new inventions are obtained from previous designs. Additionally, it has been conjectured that the…
Science mapping (SM), the study of the organization and development of science and technology, is a rapidly developing field within information science. The volume of available data allows this methodology to empirically address such issues…
We propose a simple model to explore an educational phenomenon where the correct answer emerges from group discussion. We construct our model based on several plausible assumptions: (i) We tend to follow peers' opinions. However, if a…
This paper extends endogenous economic growth models to incorporate knowledge externality. We explores whether spatial knowledge spillovers among regions exist, whether spatial knowledge spillovers promote regional innovative activities,…
How to incentivize self-interested agents to explore when they prefer to exploit? Consider a population of self-interested agents that make decisions under uncertainty. They "explore" to acquire new information and "exploit" this…
Exposure to ideas in domains outside a scientist's own may benefit her in reformulating existing research problems in novel ways and discovering new application domains for existing solution ideas. While improved performance in scholarly…
If a concept is not well defined, there are grounds for its abuse. This is particularly true of complexity, an inherently interdisciplinary concept that has penetrated very different fields of intellectual activity from physics to…
The rate at which scholarly literature is being produced has been increasing at approximately 3.5 percent per year for decades. This means that during a typical 40 year career the amount of new literature produced each year increases by a…
Pursuing a scientific idea is often justified by the promise associated with it. Philosophers of science have proposed a variety of approaches to such promise, including more specific indicators. Economic models in particular emphasise the…
Curiosity is a vital metacognitive skill in educational contexts. Yet, little is known about how social factors influence curiosity in group work. We argue that curiosity is evoked not only through individual, but also interpersonal…
Astrobiology is usually defined as the study of the origin, evolution, distribution, and future of life in the universe. As such it is inherently interdisciplinary and cannot help but engender a worldview infused by cosmic and evolutionary…
Technological innovations have revolutionized the process of scientific research and knowledge discovery. The availability of massive data and challenges from frontiers of research and development have reshaped statistical thinking, data…
Scientific knowledge is constantly subject to a variety of changes due to new discoveries, alternative interpretations, and fresh perspectives. Understanding uncertainties associated with various stages of scientific inquiries is an…
What factors affect a scientist's choice of research problem? Qualitative research in the history, philosophy, and sociology of science suggests that this choice is shaped by an "essential tension" between the professional demand for…
Innovation is the driving force of human progress. Recent urn models reproduce well the dynamics through which the discovery of a novelty may trigger further ones, in an expanding space of opportunities, but neglect the effects of social…
Developing a novel research idea is hard. It must be distinct enough from prior work to claim a contribution while also building on it. This requires iteratively reviewing literature and refining an idea based on what a researcher reads;…
The quest to comprehend the origins of intelligence raises intriguing questions about the evolution of learning abilities in natural systems. Why do living organisms possess an inherent drive to acquire knowledge of the unknown? Is this…