14 research outputs found
The evolution of interdisciplinarity in physics research
Science, being a social enterprise, is subject to fragmentation into groups
that focus on specialized areas or topics. Often new advances occur through
cross-fertilization of ideas between sub-fields that otherwise have little
overlap as they study dissimilar phenomena using different techniques. Thus to
explore the nature and dynamics of scientific progress one needs to consider
the large-scale organization and interactions between different subject areas.
Here, we study the relationships between the sub-fields of Physics using the
Physics and Astronomy Classification Scheme (PACS) codes employed for
self-categorization of articles published over the past 25 years (1985-2009).
We observe a clear trend towards increasing interactions between the different
sub-fields. The network of sub-fields also exhibits core-periphery
organization, the nucleus being dominated by Condensed Matter and General
Physics. However, over time Interdisciplinary Physics is steadily increasing
its share in the network core, reflecting a shift in the overall trend of
Physics research.Comment: Published version, 10 pages, 8 figures + Supplementary Informatio
The evolution of knowledge within and across fields in modern physics
9 pages, 4 figuresThe exchange of knowledge across different areas and disciplines plays a key role in the process of knowledge creation, and can stimulate innovation and the emergence of new fields. We develop here a quantitative framework to extract significant dependencies among scientific disciplines and turn them into a time-varying network whose nodes are the different fields, while the weighted links represent the flow of knowledge from one field to another at a given period of time. Drawing on a comprehensive data set on scientific production in modern physics and on the patterns of citations between articles published in the various fields in the last 30 years, we are then able to map, over time, how the ideas developed in a given field in a certain time period have influenced later discoveries in the same field or in other fields. The analysis of knowledge flows internal to each field displays a remarkable variety of temporal behaviours, with some fields of physics showing to be more self-referential than others. The temporal networks of knowledge exchanges across fields reveal cases of one field continuously absorbing knowledge from another field in the entire observed period, pairs of fields mutually influencing each other, but also cases of evolution from absorbing to mutual or even to back-nurture behaviors
Latent Geometry for Complementarity-Driven Networks
Networks of interdisciplinary teams, biological interactions as well as food
webs are examples of networks that are shaped by complementarity principles:
connections in these networks are preferentially established between nodes with
complementary properties. We propose a geometric framework for
complementarity-driven networks. In doing so we first argue that traditional
geometric representations, e.g., embeddings of networks into latent metric
spaces, are not applicable to complementarity-driven networks due to the
contradiction between the triangle inequality in latent metric spaces and the
non-transitivity of complementarity. We then propose the cross-geometric
representation for these complementarity-driven networks and demonstrate that
this representation (i) follows naturally from the complementarity rule, (ii)
is consistent with the metric property of the latent space, (iii) reproduces
structural properties of real complementarity-driven networks, if the latent
space is the hyperbolic disk, and (iv) allows for prediction of missing links
in complementarity-driven networks with accuracy surpassing existing
similarity-based methods. The proposed framework challenges social network
analysis intuition and tools that are routinely applied to
complementarity-driven networks and offers new avenues towards descriptive and
prescriptive analysis of systems in science of science and biomedicine
Evolution of interdisciplinarity in biodiversity science
The study of biodiversity has grown exponentially in the last thirty years in response to demands for greater understanding of the function and importance of Earth's biodiversity and finding solutions to conserve it. Here, we test the hypothesis that biodiversity science has become more interdisciplinary over time. To do so, we analyze 97,945 peer‐reviewed articles over a twenty‐two‐year time period (1990–2012) with a continuous time dynamic model, which classifies articles into concepts (i.e., topics and ideas) based on word co‐occurrences. Using the model output, we then quantify different aspects of interdisciplinarity: concept diversity, that is, the diversity of topics and ideas across subdisciplines in biodiversity science, subdiscipline diversity, that is, the diversity of subdisciplines across concepts, and network structure, which captures interactions between concepts and subdisciplines. We found that, on average, concept and subdiscipline diversity in biodiversity science were either stable or declining, patterns which were driven by the persistence of rare concepts and subdisciplines and a decline in the diversity of common concepts and subdisciplines, respectively. Moreover, our results provide evidence that conceptual homogenization, that is, decreases in temporal β concept diversity, underlies the observed trends in interdisciplinarity. Together, our results reveal that biodiversity science is undergoing a dynamic phase as a scientific discipline that is consolidating around a core set of concepts. Our results suggest that progress toward addressing the biodiversity crisis via greater interdisciplinarity during the study period may have been slowed by extrinsic factors, such as the failure to invest in research spanning across concepts and disciplines. However, recent initiatives such as the Intergovernmental Science‐Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) may attract broader support for biodiversity‐related issues and hence interdisciplinary approaches to address scientific, political, and societal challenges in the coming years
Knowledge and Social Relatedness Shape Research Portfolio Diversification
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
collaborations can reduce learning costs -- albeit at the expense of increased
coordination costs. In this article, we use data on the publication histories
of a very large sample of physicists to measure the effects of knowledge and
social relatedness on their diversification strategies. Using bipartite
networks, we compute a measure of topics similarity and a measure of social
proximity. We find that scientists' strategies are not random, and that they
are significantly affected by both. Knowledge relatedness across topics
explains of logistic regression deviances and social relatedness
as much as , suggesting that science is an eminently social
enterprise: when scientists move out of their core specialization, they do so
through collaborations. Interestingly, we also find a significant negative
interaction between knowledge and social relatedness, suggesting that the
farther scientists move from their specialization, the more they rely on
collaborations. Our results provide a starting point for broader quantitative
analyses of scientific diversification strategies, which could also be extended
to the domain of technological innovation -- offering insights from a
comparative and policy perspective.Comment: Typos corrected; references added; section S2 added; results
unchange
Biomedical Convergence Facilitated by the Emergence of Technological and Informatic Capabilities
We analyzed Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) from 21.6 million research
articles indexed by PubMed to map this vast space of entities and their
relations, providing insights into the origins and future of biomedical
convergence. Detailed analysis of MeSH co-occurrence networks identifies three
robust knowledge clusters: the vast universe of microscopic biological entities
and structures; systems, disease and diagnostics; and emergent biological and
social phenomena underlying the complex problems driving the health, behavioral
and brain science frontiers. These domains integrated from the 1990s onward by
way of technological and informatic capabilities that introduced highly
controllable, scalable and permutable research processes and invaluable imaging
techniques for illuminating fundamental structure-function-behavior questions.
Article-level analysis confirms a positive relationship between team size and
topical diversity, and shows convergence to be increasing in prominence but
with recent saturation. Together, our results invite additional policy support
for cross-disciplinary team assembly to harness transdisciplinary convergence.Comment: 12 pages, 4 figures; 8 pages of Supplementary Informatio