Related papers: Is Science Inevitable?
Many systems involve numerous interacting parts and the whole system can have properties that the individual parts do not. I take this novelty as the defining characteristic of an emergent property. Other characteristics associated with…
The ISI subject categories classify journals included in the Science Citation Index (SCI). The aggregated journal-journal citation matrix contained in the Journal Citation Reports can be aggregated on the basis of these categories. This…
Nature's many varied complex systems (including galaxies, stars, planets, life, and society) are islands of order within the increasingly disordered universe. All organized systems are subject to physical, biological or cultural evolution,…
Information overload and the rapid pace of scientific advancement make it increasingly difficult to evaluate and allocate resources to new research proposals. Is there a structure to scientific discovery that could inform such decisions? We…
The practice of scientific research is often thought of as individuals and small teams striving for disciplinary advances. Yet as a whole, this endeavor more closely resembles a complex system of natural computation, in which information is…
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…
This is the English version of my inaugural lecture at Coll\`ege de France in 2021, available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bxktplKMhKU. I reflect on the difficulty of multi-disciplinary research, which often hinges of unexpected…
We respond to Holst et al.'s critique that the decline in scientific disruptiveness documented in Park et al. (Nature, 2023) is an artifact of including works with zero backward citations. Using their advocated dataset, metric, and…
It has been suggested that innovations occur mainly by combination: the more inventions accumulate, the higher the probability that new inventions are obtained from previous designs. Additionally, it has been conjectured that the…
The history of science reveals that major discoveries are not predictable. Naively, one might conclude therefore that it is not possible to artificially cultivate an environment that promotes discoveries. I suggest instead that open…
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…
The logic of abduction involves a collision between deduction and induction, where empirical surprises violate expectations and scientists innovate to resolve them. Here we reformulate abduction as a social process, occurring not only…
This special volume of Statistical Sciences presents some innovative, if not provocative, ideas in the area of reliability, or perhaps more appropriately named, integrated system assessment. In this age of exponential growth in science,…
The selection of research topics by scientists can be viewed as an exploration process conducted by individuals with cognitive limitations traversing a complex cognitive landscape influenced by both individual and social factors. While…
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…
References, the mechanism scientists rely on to signal previous knowledge, lately have turned into widely used and misused measures of scientific impact. Yet, when a discovery becomes common knowledge, citations suffer from obliteration by…
Scientific evaluation is a determinant of how scientists, institutions and funders behave, and as such is a key element in the making of science. In this article, we propose an alternative to the current norm of evaluating research with…
This study elaborates a text-based metric to quantify the unique position of stylized scientific research, characterized by its innovative integration of diverse knowledge components and potential to pivot established scientific paradigms.…
Much of scientific data is collected as randomized experiments intervening on some and observing other variables of interest. Quite often, a given phenomenon is investigated in several studies, and different sets of variables are involved…
Critically growing problems of fundamental science organisation and content are analysed with examples from physics and emerging interdisciplinary fields. Their origin is specified and new science structure (organisation and content) is…