Related papers: Is Science Inevitable?
Meta-analysis is routinely performed in many scientific disciplines. This analysis is attractive since discoveries are possible even when all the individual studies are underpowered. However, the meta-analytic discoveries may be entirely…
In research policy, effective measures that lead to improvements in the generation of knowledge must be based on reliable methods of research assessment, but for many countries and institutions this is not the case. Publication and citation…
It appears paradoxical that science is producing outstanding new results and theories at a rapid rate at the same time that researchers are identifying serious problems in the practice of science that cause many reports to be irreproducible…
The impact and originality are two critical dimensions for evaluating scientific publications, measured by citation and disruption metrics respectively. Despite the extensive effort made to understand the statistical properties 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…
Scientific innovation increasingly depends on collaboration, yet the organizational structure that fosters breakthrough ideas remains poorly understood. Existing metrics - such as team size or compositional diversity - capture readily…
In the last two decades, scholars have designed various types of bibliographic related indicators to identify breakthrough-class academic achievements. In this study, we take a further step to look at properties of the promising disruptive…
Serendipity plays an important role in scientific discovery. Indeed, many of the most important breakthroughs, ranging from penicillin to the electric battery, have been made by scientists who were stimulated by a chance exposure to…
Using three-year moving averages of the complete Journal Citation Reports 1994-2016 of the Science Citation Index and the Social Sciences Citation Index (combined), we analyze links between citing and cited journals in terms of (1) whether…
Human creativity is the ultimate driving force behind scientific progress. While the building blocks of innovations are often embodied in existing knowledge, it is creativity that blends seemingly disparate ideas. Existing studies have made…
Recently we discovered (cond-mat/0212043) that the majority of scientific citations are copied from the lists of references used in other papers. Here we show that a model, in which a scientist picks three random papers, cites them,and also…
Many theories of scientific and technological progress imagine science as an iterative, developmental process periodically interrupted by innovations which disrupt and restructure the status quo. Due to the immense societal value created by…
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…
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…
Citations in science are being studied from several perspectives, among which approaches such as scientometrics and science of science. In this chapter I briefly review some of the literature on citations, citation distributions and models…
This paper outlines a framework for the study of innovation that treats discoveries as additions to evolving networks. As inventions enter they expand or limit the reach of the ideas they build on by influencing how successive discoveries…
The shift from individual effort to collaborative output has benefited science, with scientific work pursued collaboratively having increasingly led to more highly impactful research than that pursued individually. However, understanding of…
Reproducibility, the ability to recompute results, and replicability, the chances other experimenters will achieve a consistent result, are two foundational characteristics of successful scientific research. Consistent findings from…
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,…
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…