Related papers: Opening Knowledge Gaps Drives Scientific Progress

The combination of diverse, pre-existing knowledge is a common explanation for scientific breakthroughs. However, a paradox exists: while scientific output and the potential for such recombination have grown exponentially, the rate of…

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…

The growth of science and technology is a recombinative process, wherein new discoveries and inventions are built from prior knowledge. Yet relatively little is known about the manner in which scientific and technological knowledge develop…

The past few centuries have witnessed a dramatic growth in scientific and technological knowledge. However, the nature of that growth - whether exponential or otherwise - remains controversial, perhaps partly due to the lack of quantitative…

The continuous growth of scientific literature brings innovations and, at the same time, raises new challenges. One of them is related to the fact that its analysis has become difficult due to the high volume of published papers for which…

Over the last four decades, the way knowledge is created in academia has transformed dramatically: research teams have grown larger, scholars draw from ever-wider pools of prior work, and the most influential discoveries increasingly emerge…

Leveraging generative Artificial Intelligence (AI), we have transformed a dataset comprising 1,000 scientific papers into an ontological knowledge graph. Through an in-depth structural analysis, we have calculated node degrees, identified…

Researchers usually come up with new ideas only after thoroughly comprehending vast quantities of literature. The difficulty of this procedure is exacerbated by the fact that the number of academic publications is growing exponentially. In…

New ideas are often thought to arise from recombining existing knowledge. Yet despite rapid publication growth - and expanding opportunities for recombination - scientific breakthroughs remain rare. This gap between productivity and…

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 advancement of science is inherently dependent on the recombination of existing knowledge, and innovative research typically relies on the atypical recombination of established knoweldge bases. This study introduces a Knowledge…

Science is built on the scholarly consensus that shifts with time. This raises the question of how new and revolutionary ideas are evaluated and become accepted into the canon of science. Using two recently proposed metrics, we identify…

Tables in scientific papers contain a wealth of valuable knowledge for the scientific enterprise. To help the many of us who frequently consult this type of knowledge, we present Tab2Know, a new end-to-end system to build a Knowledge Base…

The development of inventions is theorized as a process of searching and recombining existing knowledge components. Previous studies under this theory have examined myriad characteristics of recombined knowledge and their performance…

We propose an explanatory and computational theory of transformative discoveries in science. The theory is derived from a recurring theme found in a diverse range of scientific change, scientific discovery, and knowledge diffusion theories…

Research publications are the primary vehicle for sharing scientific progress in the form of new discoveries, methods, techniques, and insights. Unfortunately, the lack of a large-scale, comprehensive, and easy-to-use resource capturing the…

To enable efficient exploration of Web-scale scientific knowledge, it is necessary to organize scientific publications into a hierarchical concept structure. In this work, we present a large-scale system to (1) identify hundreds of…

The scientific literature is a rich source of information for data mining with conceptual knowledge graphs; the open science movement has enriched this literature with complementary source code that implements scientific models. To exploit…

The exponential growth in scientific publications poses a severe challenge for human researchers. It forces attention to more narrow sub-fields, which makes it challenging to discover new impactful research ideas and collaborations outside…

Knowledge is a network of interconnected concepts. Yet, precisely how the topological structure of knowledge constrains its acquisition remains unknown, hampering the development of learning enhancement strategies. Here we study the…