Searching for new breakthroughs in science: How effective are computerised detection algorithms?

In this study we design, develop, implement and test an analytical framework and measurement model to detect scientific discoveries with 'breakthrough' characteristics. To do so we have developed a series of computerized search algorithms  that data mine large quantities of research publications. These algorithms facilitate early-stage detection of 'breakout' papers  that  emerge as highly cited and distinctive and are considered to be potential breakthroughs. Combining computer-aided data  mining with decision heuristics, enabled us to assess structural changes within citation patterns with the international scientific literature. In our case studies we applied a citation  impact  time  window  of 24--36 months after publication of each research paper.  In this paper, we report on our test results, in which five algorithms were applied to the entire Web of Science database. We analysed the citation impact patterns of all research articles from the period 1990--1994. We succeeded in detecting many papers with distinctive impact profiles (breakouts). A small subset of these breakouts is classified as 'breakthroughs': Nobel Prize research papers; papers occurring in Nature's Top-100 Most Cited Papers Ever; papers still (highly) cited by review papers or patents; or those frequently mentioned in today's social media. We also compare the outcomes of our algorithms with the results of a 'baseline' detection algorithm developed by Redner in 2005, which selects the world's most highly cited 'hot papers'.The detection rates of the algorithms vary, but overall, they present a powerful tool for tracing breakout papers in science. The wider applicability of these algorithms, across all science fields, has not yet been ascertained. Whether or not our early-stage breakout papers present a 'breakthrough' remains a matter of opinion, where input from subject experts is needed for verification and confirmation, but our detection approach certain helps to limit the search domain to trace and track important emerging topics in science.Merit, Expertise and Measuremen

‘Sloppy Thinking’: To What Extent Can Philosophy Contribute to the Public Understanding of Science?

This thesis will address two questions: Does philosophy contribute to the ‘public understanding of science’ (PUoS), and if so, how? The popular public image of science is one of methodology. Science is a means for making true statements about the world, where we compare hypothesis with observation against the evidence. This then allows for a body of knowledge that guides further advancements and progress. Philosophy, however, seems to be antithetical to this. A popular notion is that philosophy is either what science was, or it deals with objects and ideas so intangible, that they have no real effect in the world. Either it is an outmoded way of doing science, or it is the preserve of armchair academics. In both cases the average person would be forgiven for thinking it had no relevance to them, and especially their ability to understand science. This thesis will look to challenge this relationship. Using hermeneutics, discourse-textual analysis and deconstruction, I present two interpretations of science and philosophy. These two interpretations I will call the ‘methodological’ and ‘historical’ approach. The ‘methodological’ approach is to understand science as a collection of principles or rules that, if followed, will produce true statements about the world. An example of such a principle that intersected both philosophy and science is ‘falsification’ as understood through the ‘problem of demarcation’ (PoD). The irrelevance of philosophy to science is fortified by the constant failure to produce fixed rules for what makes one thing scientific and another not. The ‘historical’ approach is to understand the actions of scientists as historical events. So rather than ask ‘what is science?’ we might ask, ‘what does it mean to act scientifically?’ I will argue philosophy can be of use in overcoming the antagonism between understanding a methodological question historically and a historical question methodologically. Firstly, I give an uncontroversial reading of the PoD, as argued by Karl Popper, who represents the ‘methodological’ view and oppose this to the ‘historical’ approach of Paul Feyerabend. Due to the dominance of the interpretation of science as a methodology, I argue that historical critiques, like Feyerabend’s, become nonsensical when understood as methodological substitutes. This is what I call the ‘received view’of what both Popper and Feyerabend had to say on science. Here, Popper fails to solve the PoD and Feyerabend appears to deny the method, objectivity or rationality of science. Next, using ideas inspired by Heidegger, I reverse those roles by presenting a ‘methodological’ and ‘historical’ reading of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn. I develop two types of language, which I call ‘about’ and ‘of’ language that map on to the methodological and historical distinctions. Using this method I construct two contradictory readings of the text, but unlike the Popper-Feyerabend antagonism, we see how the historical approach is the more fertile interpretation. One version, which I call the ‘strong’ reading, has Kuhn as a relativist, irrationalist or anti-science, which is important if this is the ‘received view’ of Kuhn. This reading carries political weight with ‘interest groups’ who may wish to undermine the epistemic authority of science. That same reading can be used to discredit Kuhn/ philosophy of science, and by extension philosophy as a worthwhile instrument for understanding science. The other version, which I call the ‘weak’ reading, has Kuhn as a supporter and defender of science, but it also resolves old philosophical disputes by framing the problem in a different way. This will not only problematize any notion of a dominant interpretation, but it gives good grounds why one cannot be relativist or irrationalist about ‘truth’. Thus it defends the epistemic authority of science, and also gives philosophy a valuable role in public thinking about science

Reading Peer Review

This Element presents the background contexts and histories of peer review, the data-handling sensitivities of this type of research, the typical properties of reports in the journal to which the authors had access, a taxonomy of the reports, and their sentiment arcs. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core

Mark Oliphant and the Invisible College of the Peaceful Atom

The weapon first created by atomic scientists of the 1940s was unprecedented in its power and potential to kill. Not only can it destroy infrastructure and all living things over a wide area, it leaves a haunting invisible footprint of radiation that can continue to harm long after its heat has dissipated. The atomic bomb was first conceptualised, proven and built by civilian scientists and overseen by an ambitious military and wary bureaucrats. The scientists belligerently lobbied their governments to take the potential of atomic weaponry seriously and it is hence not surprising that they are often portrayed as ghoulishly mad savants who strung the bow of mass destruction.1 The atomic bomb proved such an effective killing machine that it provoked the Anglo- Australian physicist, Sir Ernest Titterton, to include a chapter in his 1956 book, Facing an Atomic Future, entitled ‘The Economics of Slaughter’.2 Titterton presented grotesque calculations that suggested atomic weaponry could kill for as little as ‘2½ d [pence] per man, woman and child’.3 The atomic bomb, as we know, played a decisive hand in the end of the world’s most deadly war—World War Two. During the Cold War the role of the atomic bomb—and its even more devastating offspring, the thermonuclear hydrogen bomb—caused tension, anxiety and outright fear as the world’s superpowers faced off in an arms race in which all-out conflict could have resulted in the end of humanity. The story of the twentieth century is, in many respects, the story of the atom. During the early years the investigations into the structure of the atom were centred in powerful European nations such as Britain, Germany and France. But during the war the United States borrowed scientists and the knowledge from Europe and combined it with resources and enterprise to efficiently produce the technology for the final vanquishing moments of World War Two. This rise of American atomic utility continued into the Cold War arms race. In addition, postwar, industry looked in wonderment at the technology achieved during the war and saw how productive large groups of collaborating scientists could be. The postwar technological age was, in part, a product of a change of mode in scientific research from the university to government, military, and private enterprise. The origins of the atomic age can be traced to Henri Becquerel and Marie and Pierre Curie’s discovery of radiation in the late nineteenth century; Albert Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity in 1905; and Ernest Rutherford’s proof on the structure of the atom in 1909.4 The atomic age reached a crescendo with the dropping of atomic bombs that smote Japan in August 1945. There are several names that history links particularly to the atomic bomb, including the Germans Otto Hahn and Friedrich Strassman, who split the uranium atom in 1938; Austrians Lise Meitner and Otto Frisch, who first explained this as nuclear fission in 1939; the Hungarian Leo Szilard, who theorised an uncontrolled nuclear explosion in the same year; Enrico Fermi, the Italian who built the first nuclear reactor; and the eccentric American polymath, Robert Oppenheimer, who led the Manhattan Project to build the first bombs. Yet in the background was Mark Oliphant—a remarkable Australian scientist whose intellect, likeable and roguish personality, and international friendships helped stitch together this vast patchwork of scientists that made the bomb possible

Land-grant ideology, the Wisconsin idea, and the foundations of Van Rensselaer Potter's bioethics

In this dissertation I argue that properly situating Van Rensselaer Potter's bioethics makes it newly available to those seeking an alternative conceptual framework for global bioethics discourse. Locating Potter in the heretofore unappreciated context of the land-grant college ideology (evinced by those institutions established by the 1862 federal Morrill Act with a charge to democratize higher education and apply knowledge in the best interests of the public) and the Wisconsin Idea (a still–extant Progressive – era policy of applying university research to social legislation) not only illuminates its distinctive features but renders transparent its previously opaque epistemic culture. I outline how American bioethics as it is commonly understood took form at Georgetown University in the early 1970s with a mandate to consider the impact of new medical technologies on society, particularly in relation to reproductive and human fetal tissue research. This work yielded a vision that became known as principlism, the now-dominant form of Western bioethical discourse. I look at the various criticisms of principlism, as well as the inability of its critics to discard the principles framework. I then contrast principlism with the distinctly different understanding of bioethics that was offered in 1970 by Van Rensselaer Potter when he coined the word "bioethics." I discuss how, when Potter first began to speak of bioethics, he envisioned a "bridge to the future, " a union of science and the humanities that would foster cross–disciplinary thinking in anticipation of, and in the hope of averting, a worsening ecological crisis and its resultant negative impact on human health and well–being. The response to threats posed by technology — "dangerous knowledge" — was not to limit knowledge, but to respond with more knowledge, with the kind of contextual and moral vision that only transdisciplinary knowledge could provide. While Potter originally envisioned this work as a specific obligation of scientists, he gradually came to understand it as a social activity, a shift in communal perceptions and obligations. Finally, I suggest that Potter's bioethics has tremendous potential for redeeming bioethics and offers an alternative vision that is truly redemptive

Reading Peer Review: PLOS ONE and Institutional Change in Academia

How do you change the world of academia and what insight can peer review provide into this question? The study of academic peer review is often difficult owing to the confidentiality of reports. As an occluded genre of writing that nonetheless underpins scientific publication, relatively little is known about the ways that academics write and behave, at scale, in their reviewing practices. In this book, we describe for the first time the database of peer review reports at PLOS ONE, the largest scientific journal in the world, to which we had unique access. Specifically, this book presents the background contexts and histories of peer review, the data-handling sensitivities of this type of research, the typical properties of reports in the journal to which we had access, a taxonomy of the reports, and their sentiment arcs. This unique work thereby yields a compelling and unprecedented set of insights into the evolving state of peer review in the twenty-first century, at a crucial political moment for the transformation of science. It also, though, presents a study in radicalism and the ways in which PLOS’s vision for science can be said to have effected change in the ultra-conservative contemporary university

Joe Pawsey and the Founding of Australian Radio Astronomy

This open access book is a biography of Joseph L. Pawsey. It examines not only his life but the birth and growth of the field of radio astronomy and the state of science itself in twentieth century Australia. The book explains how an isolated continent with limited resources grew to be one of the leaders in the study of radio astronomy and the design of instruments to do so. Pawsey made a name for himself in the international astronomy community within a decade after WWII and coined the term radio astronomy. His most valuable talent was his ability to recruit and support bright young scientists who became the technical and methodological innovators of the era, building new telescopes from the Mills Cross and Chris (Christiansen) Cross to the Parkes radio telescope. The development of aperture synthesis and the controversy surrounding the cosmological interpretation of the first major survey which resulted in the Sydney research group's disagreements with Nobel laureate Martin Ryle play major roles in this story. This book also shows the connections among prominent astronomers like Oort, Minkowski, Baade, Struve, famous scientists in the UK such as J.A. Ratcliffe, Edward Appleton and Henry Tizard, and the engineers and physicists in Australia who helped develop the field of radio astronomy. Pawsey was appointed the second Director of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (Green Bank, West Virginia) in October 1961; he died in Sydney at the age of 54 in late November 1962. Upper level students, scientists and historians will find the information, much of it from primary sources, relevant to any study of Joseph L. Pawsey or radio astronomy. This is an open access book

Joe Pawsey and the Founding of Australian Radio Astronomy

This open access book is a biography of Joseph L. Pawsey. It examines not only his life but the birth and growth of the field of radio astronomy and the state of science itself in twentieth century Australia. The book explains how an isolated continent with limited resources grew to be one of the leaders in the study of radio astronomy and the design of instruments to do so. Pawsey made a name for himself in the international astronomy community within a decade after WWII and coined the term radio astronomy. His most valuable talent was his ability to recruit and support bright young scientists who became the technical and methodological innovators of the era, building new telescopes from the Mills Cross and Chris (Christiansen) Cross to the Parkes radio telescope. The development of aperture synthesis and the controversy surrounding the cosmological interpretation of the first major survey which resulted in the Sydney research group's disagreements with Nobel laureate Martin Ryle play major roles in this story. This book also shows the connections among prominent astronomers like Oort, Minkowski, Baade, Struve, famous scientists in the UK such as J.A. Ratcliffe, Edward Appleton and Henry Tizard, and the engineers and physicists in Australia who helped develop the field of radio astronomy. Pawsey was appointed the second Director of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (Green Bank, West Virginia) in October 1961; he died in Sydney at the age of 54 in late November 1962. Upper level students, scientists and historians will find the information, much of it from primary sources, relevant to any study of Joseph L. Pawsey or radio astronomy. This is an open access book