Evolution Of Scientific Fields Research Articles

Quantifying the rise and fall of scientific fields.

Science advances by pushing the boundaries of the adjacent possible. While the global scientific enterprise grows at an exponential pace, at the mesoscopic level the exploration and exploitation of research ideas are reflected through the rise and fall of research fields. The empirical literature has largely studied such dynamics on a case-by-case basis, with a focus on explaining how and why communities of knowledge production evolve. Although fields rise and fall on different temporal and population scales, they are generally argued to pass through a common set of evolutionary stages. To understand the social processes that drive these stages beyond case studies, we need a way to quantify and compare different fields on the same terms. In this paper we develop techniques for identifying common patterns in the evolution of scientific fields and demonstrate their usefulness using 1.5 million preprints from the arXiv repository covering 175 research fields spanning Physics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Quantitative Biology and Quantitative Finance. We show that fields consistently follow a rise and fall pattern captured by a two parameters right-tailed Gumbel temporal distribution. We introduce a field-specific re-scaled time and explore the generic properties shared by articles and authors at the creation, adoption, peak, and decay evolutionary phases. We find that the early phase of a field is characterized by disruptive works mixing of cognitively distant fields written by small teams of interdisciplinary authors, while late phases exhibit the role of specialized, large teams building on the previous works in the field. This method provides foundations to quantitatively explore the generic patterns underlying the evolution of research fields in science, with general implications in innovation studies.

Using text analysis to quantify the similarity and evolution of scientific disciplines.

We use an information-theoretic measure of linguistic similarity to investigate the organization and evolution of scientific fields. An analysis of almost 20 M papers from the past three decades reveals that the linguistic similarity is related but different from experts and citation-based classifications, leading to an improved view on the organization of science. A temporal analysis of the similarity of fields shows that some fields (e.g. computer science) are becoming increasingly central, but that on average the similarity between pairs of disciplines has not changed in the last decades. This suggests that tendencies of convergence (e.g. multi-disciplinarity) and divergence (e.g. specialization) of disciplines are in balance.

Which Research Fields Get Better Faster? Measuring the Evolution of International Research Collaboration

A fundamental problem in the field of the economics of science is how to accurately measure the evolution of collaboration patterns across different scientific fields. This study confronts the problem by employing a model of morphological changes in order to measure and evaluate the relative growth of international scientific collaboration in comparison with domestic collaboration. Empirical evidence, based on co-authored articles from 1997–2012, shows an acceleration of international research collaboration in medical sciences, social sciences, and some specific applied sciences, including geosciences, agricultural sciences, and psychology. These research fields have benefited from a disproportionate relative growth of international co-authored articles in comparison to collaborations with domestic institutions only. By contrast, some theoretical sciences, including physics and mathematics, have lower relative growth in international collaborations). This evolution of scientific fields is analyzed to explain some possible determinants of the ongoing social dynamics of science that support the pervasive plexus (interwoven combination of parts in a system) and development of modern science in society. Moreover, this new approach here can predict which research fields are likeliest to advance rapidly and which are likely to develop more slowly. Knowing this can help policy makers make better investment decisions between different scientific fields to support the progress of science and technology.

Standing on the Shoulders of Giants: An Examination of the Interdisciplinary Foundation of Relationship Marketing

In the 20th century, the scholarly study of human relationships both grew dramatically and simultaneously fragmented into various disciplines and subdisciplines. Although diversity of thought is generally considered helpful for the evolution of scientific fields, the value accrued from interdisciplinary discourse depends on the ability of scholars to integrate multiple perspectives and synthesize foundational works in a systematic manner. The goal of this study is to synthesize foundational theories from social and behavioral sciences that have contributed to an understanding of relationship marketing. In seeking to provide a holistic understanding of the field, we incorporate contributions from the disciplines of marketing, management, psychology, and sociology. In building on our analysis, we synthesize our findings into a conceptual model that examines the systematic dimensions of relationship marketing. The article concludes by identifying key themes for contributors to the Journal of Relationship Marketing to consider going forward.