Related papers: Quantifying the rise and fall of scientific fields
Despite the apparent cross-disciplinary interactions among scientific fields, a formal description of their evolution is lacking. Here we describe a novel approach to study the dynamics and evolution of scientific fields using a…
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…
The evolution of scientific fields has been attracting much attention in recent years. One of the key issues in evolution of scientific field is to quantify the dissimilarity between two collections of scientific publications in literature.…
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…
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…
Over the last four decades, the way knowledge is created in academia has transformed dramatically: research teams have grown larger, scholars draw from ever-wider pools of prior work, and the most influential discoveries increasingly emerge…
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 past few centuries have witnessed a dramatic growth in scientific and technological knowledge. However, the nature of that growth - whether exponential or otherwise - remains controversial, perhaps partly due to the lack of quantitative…
It has long been known that scientific output proceeds on an exponential increase, or more properly, a logistic growth curve. The interplay between effort and discovery is clear, and the nature of the functional form has been thought to be…
Drawing on a large database of publicly announced R&D alliances, we empirically investigate the evolution of R&D networks and the process of alliance formation in several manufacturing sectors over a 24-year period (1986-2009). Our goal is…
Our quantitative understanding of how scientists choose and shift their research focus over time is highly consequential, because it affects the ways in which scientists are trained, science is funded, knowledge is organized and discovered,…
In recent years, with the increase of social investment in scientific research, the number of research results in various fields has increased significantly. Cross-disciplinary research results have gradually become an emerging frontier…
The tremendous advances in computer science in the last few decades have provided the platform to address and solve complex problems using interdisciplinary research. In this paper, we investigate how the extent of interdisciplinarity in…
From small steps to great leaps, metaphors of spatial mobility abound to describe discovery processes. Here, we ground these ideas in formal terms by systematically studying scientific knowledge mobility patterns. We use low-dimensional…
One of the most interesting scientific challenges nowadays deals with the analysis and the understanding of complex networks' dynamics. A major issue is the definition of new frameworks for the exploration of the dynamics at play in real…
Research teams are the fundamental social unit of science, and yet there is currently no model that describes their basic property: size. In most fields teams have grown significantly in recent decades. We show that this is partly due to…
Describing the evolution of science is a salient work not only for revealing the scientific trend but also for establishing a scientific classification system. In this paper, we investigate the evolution of science by observing the…
Understanding the changing structure of science over time is essential to elucidating how science evolves. We develop diachronic embeddings of scholarly periodicals to quantify "semantic changes" of periodicals across decades, allowing us…
The quest for historically impactful science and technology provides invaluable insight into the innovation dynamics of human society, yet many studies are limited to qualitative and small-scale approaches. Here, we investigate scientific…
We propose a series of methods to represent the evolution of a field of science at different levels: namely micro, meso and macro levels. We use a previously introduced asymmetric measure of paradigmatic proximity between terms that enables…