Related papers: The evolution of scientific literature as metastab…
Researchers usually come up with new ideas only after thoroughly comprehending vast quantities of literature. The difficulty of this procedure is exacerbated by the fact that the number of academic publications is growing exponentially. In…
New scientific ideas drive progress, yet measuring scientific novelty remains challenging. We use natural language processing to detect the origin and impact of new ideas in scientific publications. To validate our methods, we analyze Nobel…
Scientific information expresses human understanding of nature. This knowledge is largely disseminated in different forms of text, including scientific papers, news articles, and discourse among people on social media. While important for…
The development of inventions is theorized as a process of searching and recombining existing knowledge components. Previous studies under this theory have examined myriad characteristics of recombined knowledge and their performance…
Our current societies increasingly rely on electronic repositories of collective knowledge. An archetype of these databases is the Web of Science (WoS) that stores scientific publications. In contrast to several other forms of knowledge --…
The exponential growth in scientific publications poses a severe challenge for human researchers. It forces attention to more narrow sub-fields, which makes it challenging to discover new impactful research ideas and collaborations outside…
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…
The scientific literature is a rich source of information for data mining with conceptual knowledge graphs; the open science movement has enriched this literature with complementary source code that implements scientific models. To exploit…
There has been a long history of research into the structure and evolution of mankind's scientific endeavor. However, recent progress in applying the tools of science to understand science itself has been unprecedented because only recently…
New ideas are often thought to arise from recombining existing knowledge. Yet despite rapid publication growth - and expanding opportunities for recombination - scientific breakthroughs remain rare. This gap between productivity and…
Scientific progress is inherently sequential: collective knowledge is updated as new studies enter the literature. We propose the sequential meta-analysis research trace (SMART), which quantifies the influence of each study at the time it…
The emergence of large language models offers new possibilities for structured exploration of scientific knowledge. Rather than viewing scientific discovery as isolated ideas or content, we propose a structured approach that emphasizes the…
Discursive knowledge emerges as codification in flows of communication. The flows of communication are constrained and enabled by networks of communications as their historical manifestations at each moment of time. New publications modify…
We stand at the foot of a significant inflection in the trajectory of scientific discovery. As society continues on its fast-paced digital transformation, so does humankind's collective scientific knowledge and discourse. We now read and…
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…
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…
Technological knowledge evolves not only through the generation of new ideas, but also through the reinterpretation of existing ones. Reinterpretations lead to changes in the classification of knowledge, that is, reclassification. This…
Scientific progress has long been understood as recombinant, with breakthroughs arising when existing ideas are joined in new ways. Empirical work in this tradition has focused on the inputs to discovery, asking whether a paper draws…
Determining how scientific achievements influence the subsequent process of knowledge creation is a fundamental step in order to build a unified ecosystem for studying the dynamics of innovation and competitiveness. Relying separately on…
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…