Dynamics of social network structure for Alzheimer and Lymphoma scientific communities.

Shahar Barbash

doi:10.1186/s13062-015-0040-2

Abstract

It is generally assumed that sociology affects scientific progress but specific examples of this assumption are hard to find. We examined this hypothesis by comparing the social network structure and its dynamics over the last 16 years, for two common human diseases; Alzheimer’s disease, for which there has been very little therapeutic progress, and Lymphoma, were there has been significant therapeutic progress. We found that the Alzheimer’s research community is more interlinked (‘dense’) and more ‘cliquish’ than that of Lymphoma and suggest that this could affect its scientific progress.ReviewersThis article was reviewed by Vladimir Kuznetsov and Anthony Almudevar

Highlights

Scientific progress is affected by technologies, availability of funds and dominant hypotheses, and by the social links between scientists
Sociology affects scientific progress [1]. We examined this hypothesis by comparing two human diseases which seem to have different rates of progress: Alzheimer’s disease (AD), for which no substantial therapeutic development was made during the last decade [2], and Lymphoma, for which, at the same time, therapeutic treatment was significantly improved [3]
We found the AD research community to be denser and more ‘cliquish’ that of Lymphoma and suggest that these changes may affect scientific progress

Summary

Introduction

In order to build research-community-based social network we scanned the scientific literature represented in PubMed for publications with either the word ‘Alzheimer’ or ‘Lymphoma’ in the title or the abstract sections, over the course of the last 16 years (from 1998 to 2013). In order to measure density of the AD and Lymphoma networks we plotted the network degree distribution; a distribution (in log scale) of the total number of links each researcher in the network has, across the four epochs (Figure 1b).

Results

Conclusion