Related papers: Quantifying the rise and fall of scientific fields

When a system is brought to a metastable state, nuclei of the equilibrium phase form and grow. This is the well-known nucleation and growth of first-order phase transitions. Near a critical point of a continuous phase transition, critical…

Certain areas of scientific research flourish while others lose advocates and attention. We are interested in whether structural patterns within citation networks correspond to the growth or decline of the research areas to which those…

Science is a growing system, exhibiting ~4% annual growth in publications and ~1.8% annual growth in the number of references per publication. Combined these trends correspond to a 12-year doubling period in the total supply of references,…

The present study focuses on persistence in research productivity over the course of an individual's entire scientific career. We track 'late-career' scientists - scientists with at least 25 years of publishing experience (N=320,564) - in…

Techniques for detecting critical phenomena -- phase transitions where correlation length diverges and small perturbations have large effects -- have been developed across multiple fields over nine decades. We survey between six and twelve…

1. Theoretical models pertaining to feedbacks between ecological and evolutionary processes are prevalent in multiple biological fields. An integrative overview is currently lacking, due to little crosstalk between the fields and the use of…

Scientific research trends and interests evolve over time. The ability to identify and forecast these trends is vital for educational institutions, practitioners, investors, and funding organizations. In this study, we predict future trends…

In all of science, the authors of publications depend on the knowledge presented by the previous publications. Thus they "stand on the shoulders of giants" and there is a flow of knowledge from previous publications to more recent ones. The…

References are an essential component of research articles and therefore of scientific communication. In this study we investigate referencing (citing) behavior in five diverse fields (astronomy, mathematics, robotics, ecology and…

Science is becoming increasingly more interdisciplinary, giving rise to more diversity in the areas of expertise within research labs and groups. This also have brought changes to the role researchers in scientific works. As a consequence,…

Here we review the development of protein scaling theory, starting from backgrounds in mathematics and statistical mechanics, and leading to biomedical applications. Evolution has organized each protein family in different ways, but scaling…

How nations shape the scientific frontier matters for technological competition, but standard metrics, including publication counts, citations, and disruption indices, look backward and fail to distinguish between fundamentally different…

Scientific collaborations shape ideas as well as innovations and are both the substrate for, and the outcome of, academic careers. Recent studies show that gender inequality is still present in many scientific practices ranging from hiring…

We explore a systematic approach to studying the dynamics of evolving networks at a coarse-grained, system level. We emphasize the importance of finding good observables (network properties) in terms of which coarse grained models can be…

Several studies exist which use scientific literature for comparing scientific activities (e.g., productivity, and collaboration). In this study, using co-authorship data over the last 40 years, we present the evolutionary dynamics of multi…

We present a novel approach to visually locate bodies of research within the sciences, both at each moment of time and dynamically. This article describes how this approach fits with other efforts to locally and globally map scientific…

Collaboration networks evolve throughout academic careers, yet few studies systematically examine how these network dynamics relate to long-term career success and mobility. Analysing 35,708 physicists' careers spanning at least 15 years,…

The prediction of exceptional or surprising growth in research is an issue with deep roots and few practical solutions. In this study we develop and validate a novel approach to forecasting growth in highly specific research communities.…

Collaborations and citations within scientific research grow simultaneously and interact dynamically. Modelling the coevolution between them helps to study many phenomena that can be approached only through combining citation and…

e-Research is a rapidly growing research area, both in terms of publications and in terms of funding. In this article we argue that it is necessary to reconceptualize the ways in which we seek to measure and understand e-Research by…