Related papers: Is Science Inevitable?
Scientific fact-checking aims to determine the veracity of scientific claims by retrieving and analysing evidence from research literature. The problem is inherently more complex than general fact-checking since it must accommodate the…
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,…
Distorted science communication harms individuals and society as it can lead to unhealthy behavior change and decrease trust in scientific institutions. Given the rapidly increasing volume of science communication in recent years, a…
Citation metrics are becoming pervasive in the quantitative evaluation of scholars, journals and institutions. More then ever before, hiring, promotion, and funding decisions rely on a variety of impact metrics that cannot disentangle…
The reproducibility of scientific articles is central to the advancement of science. Despite this importance, evaluating reproducibility remains challenging due to the scarcity of ground truth data. Predictive models can address this…
The nature of the scientific method is controversial with claims that a single scientific method does not even exist. However the scientific method does exist. It is the building of logical and self consistent models to describe nature. The…
The tension between qualitative theorizing and quantitative methods is pervasive in the social sciences, and poses a constant challenge to empirical research. But in science studies as an interdisciplinary specialty, there are additional…
Science prizes purportedly reward innovation and explorations of new phenomena. Yet, in practice prizes may inadvertently divert resources from similarly impactful but less celebrated scholars. Despite this paradox, knowledge of how…
Most major discoveries in astronomy are unplanned, and result from surveying the Universe in a new way, rather than by testing a hypothesis or conducting an investigation with planned outcomes. For example, of the 10 greatest discoveries…
Understanding the changing structure of science over time is essential to elucidating how science evolves. We develop diachronic embeddings of scholarly periodicals to quantify "semantic changes" of periodicals across decades, allowing us…
The lack of predictability of citation-based measures frequently used to gauge impact, from impact factors to short-term citations, raises a fundamental question: Is there long-term predictability in citation patterns? Here, we derive a…
For decades the number of scientific publications has been rapidly increasing, effectively out-dating knowledge at a tremendous rate. Only few scientific milestones remain relevant and continuously attract citations. Here we quantify how…
The problem of identifying common concepts in the sciences and deciding when new ideas have emerged is an open one. Metascience researchers have sought to formalize principles underlying stages in the life-cycle of scientific research,…
Understanding how institutional changes within academia may affect the overall potential of science requires a better quantitative representation of how careers evolve over time. Since knowledge spillovers, cumulative advantage,…
We demonstrate a comprehensive framework that accounts for citation dynamics of scientific papers and for the age distribution of references. We show that citation dynamics of scientific papers is nonlinear and this nonlinearity has…
Innovation is to organizations what evolution is to organisms: it is how organisations adapt to changes in the environment and improve. Governments, institutions and firms that innovate are more likely to prosper and stand the test of time;…
Can scientific discovery be made arbitrarily easy by choosing the right representation, collecting enough data, and deploying sufficiently powerful algorithms? This paper argues that the answer is fundamentally negative. We introduce the…
Predicting the scientific productivity of researchers is a basic task for academic administrators and funding agencies. This study provided a model for the publication dynamics of researchers, inspired by the distribution feature of…
Scientific novelty drives advances at the research frontier, yet it is also associated with heightened uncertainty and potential resistance from incumbent paradigms, leading to complex patterns of scientific impact. Prior studies have…
Innovation records often exhibit "hockey-stick" patterns of abrupt, near-singular growth at the collective level. However, this macroscopic explosiveness stands in stark contrast to individual discovery, which remains bounded by cognitive…