Abstract
The tempo and mode of human knowledge expansion is an enduring yet poorly understood topic. Through a temporal network analysis of three decades of discoveries of protein interactions and genetic interactions in baker's yeast, we show that the growth of scientific knowledge is exponential over time and that important subjects tend to be studied earlier. However, expansions of different domains of knowledge are highly heterogeneous and episodic such that the temporal turnover of knowledge hubs is much greater than expected by chance. Familiar subjects are preferentially studied over new subjects, leading to a reduced pace of innovation. While research is increasingly done in teams, the number of discoveries per researcher is greater in smaller teams. These findings reveal collective human behaviors in scientific research and help design better strategies in future knowledge exploration.
Highlights
Scientific knowledge refers to the body of facts and principles that are known in a given field
Exponential Growth and Productivity of Individuals Gene-gene interactions are separated into two types: genetic interactions (GIs) and protein-protein interactions (PPIs) [9]
The data we considered contain 37,809 PPIs among 4,913 genes and 35,231 GIs among 3,743 genes, respectively
Summary
Scientific knowledge refers to the body of facts and principles that are known in a given field. Patterns and mechanisms of human knowledge growth are jointly determined by the intrinsic structure of knowledge and human behaviors in knowledge exploration Such behaviors are of interest to many scientists including philosophers [1,2], sociologists [3], anthropologists [4], economists [5], physicists [6], and psychologists [7], they are poorly studied, due primarily to the lack of ideal cases in which (i) the structure of the knowledge is known, (ii) the knowledge is quantifiable, and (iii) the process of knowledge discovery is well understood and documented. We here analyze the temporal growth of the known yeast gene-gene interactions to understand the tempo and mode of scientific knowledge expansion
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