8,361 research outputs found
How are topics born? Understanding the research dynamics preceding the emergence of new areas
The ability to promptly recognise new research trends is strategic for many stake- holders, including universities, institutional funding bodies, academic publishers and companies. While the literature describes several approaches which aim to identify the emergence of new research topics early in their lifecycle, these rely on the assumption that the topic in question is already associated with a number of publications and consistently referred to by a community of researchers. Hence, detecting the emergence of a new research area at an embryonic stage, i.e., before the topic has been consistently labelled by a community of researchers and associated with a number of publications, is still an open challenge. In this paper, we begin to address this challenge by performing a study of the dynamics preceding the creation of new topics. This study indicates that the emergence of a new topic is anticipated by a significant increase in the pace of collaboration between relevant research areas, which can be seen as the ‘parents’ of the new topic. These initial findings (i) confirm our hypothesis that it is possible in principle to detect the emergence of a new topic at the embryonic stage, (ii) provide new empirical evidence supporting relevant theories in Philosophy of Science, and also (iii) suggest that new topics tend to emerge in an environment in which weakly interconnected research areas begin to cross-fertilise
The Child is Father of the Man: Foresee the Success at the Early Stage
Understanding the dynamic mechanisms that drive the high-impact scientific
work (e.g., research papers, patents) is a long-debated research topic and has
many important implications, ranging from personal career development and
recruitment search, to the jurisdiction of research resources. Recent advances
in characterizing and modeling scientific success have made it possible to
forecast the long-term impact of scientific work, where data mining techniques,
supervised learning in particular, play an essential role. Despite much
progress, several key algorithmic challenges in relation to predicting
long-term scientific impact have largely remained open. In this paper, we
propose a joint predictive model to forecast the long-term scientific impact at
the early stage, which simultaneously addresses a number of these open
challenges, including the scholarly feature design, the non-linearity, the
domain-heterogeneity and dynamics. In particular, we formulate it as a
regularized optimization problem and propose effective and scalable algorithms
to solve it. We perform extensive empirical evaluations on large, real
scholarly data sets to validate the effectiveness and the efficiency of our
method.Comment: Correct some typos in our KDD pape
Intrinsically Dynamic Network Communities
Community finding algorithms for networks have recently been extended to
dynamic data. Most of these recent methods aim at exhibiting community
partitions from successive graph snapshots and thereafter connecting or
smoothing these partitions using clever time-dependent features and sampling
techniques. These approaches are nonetheless achieving longitudinal rather than
dynamic community detection. We assume that communities are fundamentally
defined by the repetition of interactions among a set of nodes over time.
According to this definition, analyzing the data by considering successive
snapshots induces a significant loss of information: we suggest that it blurs
essentially dynamic phenomena - such as communities based on repeated
inter-temporal interactions, nodes switching from a community to another across
time, or the possibility that a community survives while its members are being
integrally replaced over a longer time period. We propose a formalism which
aims at tackling this issue in the context of time-directed datasets (such as
citation networks), and present several illustrations on both empirical and
synthetic dynamic networks. We eventually introduce intrinsically dynamic
metrics to qualify temporal community structure and emphasize their possible
role as an estimator of the quality of the community detection - taking into
account the fact that various empirical contexts may call for distinct
`community' definitions and detection criteria.Comment: 27 pages, 11 figure
Prediction of Emerging Technologies Based on Analysis of the U.S. Patent Citation Network
The network of patents connected by citations is an evolving graph, which
provides a representation of the innovation process. A patent citing another
implies that the cited patent reflects a piece of previously existing knowledge
that the citing patent builds upon. A methodology presented here (i) identifies
actual clusters of patents: i.e. technological branches, and (ii) gives
predictions about the temporal changes of the structure of the clusters. A
predictor, called the {citation vector}, is defined for characterizing
technological development to show how a patent cited by other patents belongs
to various industrial fields. The clustering technique adopted is able to
detect the new emerging recombinations, and predicts emerging new technology
clusters. The predictive ability of our new method is illustrated on the
example of USPTO subcategory 11, Agriculture, Food, Textiles. A cluster of
patents is determined based on citation data up to 1991, which shows
significant overlap of the class 442 formed at the beginning of 1997. These new
tools of predictive analytics could support policy decision making processes in
science and technology, and help formulate recommendations for action
How to Compare the Scientific Contributions between Research Groups
We present a method to analyse the scientific contributions between research
groups. Given multiple research groups, we construct their journal/proceeding
graphs and then compute the similarity/gap between them using network analysis.
This analysis can be used for measuring similarity/gap of the topics/qualities
between research groups' scientific contributions. We demonstrate the
practicality of our method by comparing the scientific contributions by Korean
researchers with those by the global researchers for information security in
2006 - 2008. The empirical analysis shows that the current security research in
South Korea has been isolated from the global research trend
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