Abstract
Just like everything in nature, scientific topics flourish and perish. While existing literature well captures article’s life-cycle via citation patterns, little is known about how scientific popularity and impact evolves for a specific topic. It would be most intuitive if we could ‘feel’ topic’s activity just as we perceive the weather by temperature. Here, we conceive knowledge temperature to quantify topic overall popularity and impact through citation network dynamics. Knowledge temperature includes 2 parts. One part depicts lasting impact by assessing knowledge accumulation with an analogy between topic evolution and isobaric expansion. The other part gauges temporal changes in knowledge structure, an embodiment of short-term popularity, through the rate of entropy change with internal energy, 2 thermodynamic variables approximated via node degree and edge number. Our analysis of representative topics with size ranging from 1000 to over 30000 articles reveals that the key to flourishing is topics’ ability in accumulating useful information for future knowledge generation. Topics particularly experience temperature surges when their knowledge structure is altered by influential articles. The spike is especially obvious when there appears a single non-trivial novel research focus or merging in topic structure. Overall, knowledge temperature manifests topics’ distinct evolutionary cycles.
Highlights
TextScientific impact assessment helps shape scientific development from aspects including investment [1, 2], promotion policy [3, 4] and individual career [5, 6]
Some of them created new topics while others made major breakthroughs in existing fields. Their immense contribution and inspiration to subsequent researches has made them each a leader in their field of research. We refer to these papers as pioneering works and define a scientific topic led by each to be a citation network that consists of the pioneering work, child papers, which are all the articles that directly cite the pioneering work, and all the citations among them
Because the extraction process involves a thorough investigation into citation network structure, topic skeleton tree serves as an indispensable tool for our knowledge temperature design and for the heat distribution visualization within the topic
Summary
Citation: Fu L, Lu D, Li Q, Wang X, Zhou C (2021) Can we ‘feel’ the temperature of knowledge? Modelling scientific popularity dynamics via thermodynamics. PLoS ONE 16(2): e0244618. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0244618 Data Availability Statement: The data is available in the url provided in the supplementary file. Funding: This work is supported by NSFC. This work is supported by National Key R&D Program of China 2018YFB1004700, and NSF China under Grant (No 62020106005, 61822206, 61960206002, 61829201, 62041205, 61532012). Competing interests: NO authors have competing interests.
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