Abstract
Despite the apparent cross-disciplinary interactions among scientific fields, a formal description of their evolution is lacking. Here we describe a novel approach to study the dynamics and evolution of scientific fields using a network-based analysis. We build an idea network consisting of American Physical Society Physics and Astronomy Classification Scheme (PACS) numbers as nodes representing scientific concepts. Two PACS numbers are linked if there exist publications that reference them simultaneously. We locate scientific fields using a community finding algorithm, and describe the time evolution of these fields over the course of 1985–2006. The communities we identify map to known scientific fields, and their age depends on their size and activity. We expect our approach to quantifying the evolution of ideas to be relevant for making predictions about the future of science and thus help to guide its development.
Highlights
Cross-fertilization between different scientific fields has been recognized for its ability to encourage new developments and innovative thinking
In an effort to move beyond anecdotal evidence of the benefit of interdisciplinary discourse for science, in this paper we study the dynamics of groups, or ‘‘communities’’, of ideas using a statistical physics approach
An edge occurs between two nodes if the two Physics and Astronomy Classification Scheme (PACS) codes they represent are cited in the same paper; one paper in the database often contributes many nodes and edges to the network
Summary
Cross-fertilization between different scientific fields has been recognized for its ability to encourage new developments and innovative thinking. For this reason, multidisciplinary approaches to research are becoming more popular. In an effort to move beyond anecdotal evidence of the benefit of interdisciplinary discourse for science, in this paper we study the dynamics of groups, or ‘‘communities’’, of ideas using a statistical physics approach. We attempt to quantify the evolution of ideas and subdisciplines within physics as they emerge, interact, merge, stagnate, and desist. The quest for describing the development of scientific fields is not new. The temporal evolution of several scientific disciplines have been modeled with a coarse-grained approach [16]
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