Related papers: Is Science Inevitable?
Teams are the fundamental units propelling innovation and advancing modern science. A rich literature links the fundamental features of teams, such as their size and diversity, to academic success. However, such analyses fail to capture…
Keeping track of scientific challenges, advances and emerging directions is a fundamental part of research. However, researchers face a flood of papers that hinders discovery of important knowledge. In biomedicine, this directly impacts…
This article introduces the Multidimensional Research Assessment Matrix of scientific output. Its base notion holds that the choice of metrics to be applied in a research assessment process depends upon the unit of assessment, the research…
Novelty evaluation is vital for the promotion and management of innovation. With the advancement of information techniques and the open data movement, some progress has been made in novelty measurements. Tracking and reviewing novelty…
If scientific discovery is one of the main driving forces of human progress, insight is the fuel for the engine, which has long attracted behavior-level research to understand and model its underlying cognitive process. However, current…
There is an overall perception of increased interdisciplinarity in science, but this is difficult to confirm quantitatively owing to the lack of adequate methods to evaluate subjective phenomena. This is no different from the difficulties…
Determining how scientific achievements influence the subsequent process of knowledge creation is a fundamental step in order to build a unified ecosystem for studying the dynamics of innovation and competitiveness. Relying separately on…
Scientific breakthroughs typically emerge through the surprising violation of established research ideas, yet quantifying surprise has remained elusive because it requires a coherent model of all contemporary scientific worldviews. Deep…
Measurement is a complicated but very necessary task. Many indices have been created in an effort to define the quality of knowledge produced but they have attracted strong criticism, having become synonymous with individualism, competition…
Understanding the laws that govern a phenomenon is the core of scientific progress. This is especially true when the goal is to model the interplay between different aspects in a causal fashion. Indeed, causal inference itself is…
Scientific discovery is shaped by scientists' choices and thus by their career patterns. The increasing knowledge required to work at the frontier of science makes it harder for an individual to embark on unexplored paths. Yet…
Analyzing a large data set of publications drawn from the most competitive journals in the natural and social sciences we show that research careers exhibit the broad distributions of individual achievement characteristic of systems in…
Recent years have seen the dramatic rise of the usage of AI algorithms in pure mathematics and fundamental sciences such as theoretical physics. This is perhaps counter-intuitive since mathematical sciences require the rigorous definitions,…
Over the past two decades, several consistent procedures have been designed to infer causal conclusions from observational data. We prove that if the true causal network might be an arbitrary, linear Gaussian network or a discrete Bayes…
We present empirical data on misprints in citations to twelve high-profile papers. The great majority of misprints are identical to misprints in articles that earlier cited the same paper. The distribution of the numbers of misprint…
A qualitatively new, much more liberal and efficient organisation of science is proposed and justified, in connection with growing debate about further role and development of fundamental science. Although the key ideas can be explained…
As the increasing complexity of large-scale research requires the combined efforts of scientists with expertise in different fields, the advantages and costs of interdisciplinary scholarship have taken center stage in current debates on…
When a large number of similar entities interact among each other and with their environment at a low scale, unexpected outcomes at higher spatio-temporal scales might spontaneously arise. This nontrivial phenomenon, known as emergence,…
Citations are essential for recognizing scientific contributions, yet citation behavior is shaped by more than just relevance or quality. We analyzed approximately 255,000 refereed astronomy articles published between 2000 and 2025 to…
Authorship of scientific articles has profoundly changed from early science until now. If once upon a time a paper was authored by a handful of authors, scientific collaborations are much more prominent on average nowadays. As authorship…