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Culture evolves, not just in the trivial sense that cultures change over time, but also in the strong sense that such change is governed by Darwinian principles. Both biological and cultural evolution are essentially cumulative selection…
Scientific communication is an essential part of modern science: whereas Archimedes worked alone, Newton (correspondence with Hooke, 1676) acknowledged that "If I have seen a little further, it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants."…
Reputation is an important social construct in science, which enables informed quality assessments of both publications and careers of scientists in the absence of complete systemic information. However, the relation between reputation and…
An academic scientist's professional success depends on publishing. Publishing norms emphasize novel, positive results. As such, disciplinary incentives encourage design, analysis, and reporting decisions that elicit positive results and…
Scientific investigation procedures have been evolving to follow an ever-changing cultural landscape, the sophistication of the technology available and an ever-growing knowledge base. This continuous evolution brought investigation…
With the emergence and rapid proliferation of social media platforms and social networking sites, recent years have witnessed a surge of misinformation spreading in our daily life. Drawing on a large-scale dataset which covers more than…
Changes in citation distributions over 100 years can reveal much about the evolution of the scientific communities or disciplines. The prevalence of uncited papers or of highly-cited papers, with respect to the bulk of publications,…
The combination of diverse, pre-existing knowledge is a common explanation for scientific breakthroughs. However, a paradox exists: while scientific output and the potential for such recombination have grown exponentially, the rate of…
Despite extensive research on scientific disruption, two questions remain: why disruption has declined amid growing knowledge, and why disruptive work receives fewer and delayed citations. One way to address these questions is to identify…
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…
This brief article presents the introduction and draft of the fundamental ideas developed at length in the book of the same title, which gives a challenging point of view about science and its history/philosophy/sociology. Science is in…
This paper challenges recent research (Evans, 2008) reporting that the concentration of cited scientific literature increases with the online availability of articles and journals. Using Thomson Reuters' Web of Science, the present paper…
In recent times, the academic ecosystem has seen a tremendous growth in number of authors and publications. While most temporal studies in this area focus on evolution of co-author and citation network structure, this systemic inflation has…
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…
When PageRank began to be used for ranking in Web search, a concern soon arose that older pages have an inherent --- and potentially unfair --- advantage over emerging pages of high quality, because they have had more time to acquire…
Novel scientific knowledge is constantly produced by the scientific community. Understanding the level of novelty characterized by scientific literature is key for modeling scientific dynamics and analyzing the growth mechanisms of…
We examine the tension between academic impact - the volume of citations received by publications - and scientific disruption. Intuitively, one would expect disruptive scientific work to be rewarded by high volumes of citations and,…
The rapid evolution of scientific research has been creating a huge volume of publications every year. Among the many quantification measures of scientific impact, citation count stands out for its frequent use in the research community.…
The empirical and theoretical justification of Gartner hype curves is a very relevant open question in the field of Technological Life Cycle analysis. The scope of the present paper is to introduce a simple model describing the growth of…
The average age at which U.S. researchers get their first grant from NIH has increased from 34.3 in 1970, to 41.7 in 2004. These data raise the crucial question of the effects of aging on the scientific creativity and productivity of…