Related papers: Is Science Inevitable?
Authorship of scientific articles has profoundly changed from early science until now. While once upon a time a paper was authored by a handful of authors, scientific collaborations are much more prominent on average nowadays. As authorship…
Newton's centuries-old wisdom of standing on the shoulders of giants raises a crucial yet underexplored question: Out of all the prior works cited by a discovery, which one is its giant? Here, we develop a novel, discipline-independent…
The Internet-based encyclopaedia Wikipedia has grown to become one of the most visited web-sites on the Internet. However, critics have questioned the quality of entries, and an empirical study has shown Wikipedia to contain errors in a…
Citation analysis, as a tool for quantitative studies of science, has long emphasized direct citation relations, leaving indirect or high order citations overlooked. However, a series of early and recent studies demonstrate the existence of…
Many published research results are false, and controversy continues over the roles of replication and publication policy in improving the reliability of research. Addressing these problems is frustrated by the lack of a formal framework…
Statistical analysis of repeat misprints in scientific citations leads to the conclusion that about 80% of scientific citations are copied from the lists of references used in othe papers. Based on this finding a mathematical theory of…
Fast-growing scientific publications present challenges to the scientific community. In this paper, we describe their implications to researchers. As references form explicit foundations for researchers to conduct a study, we investigate…
Nobel Prizes are commonly seen to be among the most prestigious achievements of our times. Based on mining several million citations, we quantitatively analyze the processes driving paradigm shifts in science. We find that groundbreaking…
Despite the extraordinary successes the two great bastions of $20^{th}$ century science (Quantum Theory and General Relativity) are troubled with serious conceptual and mathematical difficulties. As a result, further growth of fundamental…
Citations are commonly held to represent scientific impact. To date, however, there is no empirical evidence in support of this postulate that is central to research assessment exercises and Science of Science studies. Here, we report on…
Is reduction always a good scientific strategy? Does it always lead to a gain in information? The very existence of the special sciences above and beyond physics seems to hint no. Previous research has shown that dimension reduction…
The way science is currently practiced shows conclusions but hides how they were reached. Researchers work privately, polish their results, publish a finished paper, and defend it. Errors are punished by retraction rather than corrected by…
Inference is the process of using facts we know to learn about facts we do not know. A theory of inference gives assumptions necessary to get from the former to the latter, along with a definition for and summary of the resulting…
The deep learning revolution has spurred a rise in advances of using AI in sciences. Within physical sciences the main focus has been on discovery of dynamical systems from observational data. Yet the reliability of learned surrogates and…
Data is a critical element in any discovery process. In the last decades, we observed exponential growth in the volume of available data and the technology to manipulate it. However, data is only practical when one can structure it for a…
Science is a cumulative activity, which can manifest itself through the act of citing. Citations are also central to research evaluation, thus creating incentives for researchers to cite their own work. Using a dataset containing more than…
The features of collaboration patterns are often considered to be different from discipline to discipline. Meanwhile, collaborating among disciplines is an obvious feature emerged in modern scientific research, which incubates several…
Recent research\cite{fort} has shown that in the 20th century there is an exponential growth of the number of published scientific papers, but new ideas has only a linear growth with time. The 19th and the first half of the 20th century saw…
The prevailing model for disseminating scientific knowledge relies on individual publications dispersed across numerous journals and archives. This legacy system is ill suited to the recent exponential proliferation of publications,…
Scientific discoveries are often made by finding a pattern or object that was not predicted by the known rules of science. Oftentimes, these anomalous events or objects that do not conform to the norms are an indication that the rules of…