Abstract
Is it possible to tell how interdisciplinary and out-of-the-box scientific papers are, or which papers are mainstream? Here we use the bibliographic coupling network, derived from all physics papers that were published in the Physical Review journals in the past century, to try to identify them as mainstream, out-of-the-box, or interdisciplinary. We show that the network clusters into scientific fields. The position of individual papers with respect to these clusters allows us to estimate their degree of mainstreamness or interdisciplinarity. We show that over the past decades the fraction of mainstream papers increases, the fraction of out-of-the-box decreases, and the fraction of interdisciplinary papers remains constant. Studying the rewards of papers, we find that in terms of absolute citations, both, mainstream and interdisciplinary papers are rewarded. In the long run, mainstream papers perform less than interdisciplinary ones in terms of citation rates. We conclude that to avoid a unilateral trend towards mainstreamness a new incentive scheme is necessary.
Highlights
Science has become a tremendously expensive industry over the past century
Current incentive structures almost exclusively reward the production of mainstream science. It is the increasing importance of the number of citations or the h-factor, it is that papers and proposals will only be accepted if they are sufficiently understood by peers— which is often not the case for out-of-the-box and novel ideas that need backgrounds from more than one field to be understood
Even though high-risk/highreward science is highly needed by society it is only happening to an astonishingly low degree in academia
Summary
Science has become a tremendously expensive industry over the past century. The world’s current total nominal Research and Development spending is approximately two trillion US dollars [1]. In today’s scheme it is better to hire a post doc that produces a predictable number of papers at a certain quality level than to “feed someone through for a decade” with the risk of not having a single paper at the end, and to be rated as a loser team Examples like these indicate that it is rational for scientists to publish in the mainstream, given that they value their careers more than they love the pure progress of science. We use the BC network to identify papers as mainstream, out-of-the-box, or interdisciplinary This is different to recent work where the role of interdisciplinary science has been explored in terms of self-reported classification schemes [20].
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