Chaining and the temporal dynamics of scientists' publishing behaviour.

ABSTRACT: Scientific progress, or scientific change, has been an important topic in the philosophy and history of science. Previous work has developed quantitative approaches to characterize the progression of science in different fields, but how individual scientists make progress through their careers is not well understood at a comprehensive scale. We characterize the regularity in the temporal dynamics of scientists' publishing behavior with computational algorithms that predict the historical emerging order of publications from individual scientists. We discover that scientists publish in ways following the processes of chaining that mirror those observed in historical word meaning extension, whereby novel ideas emerge by connecting to existing ideas that are proximal in semantic space. We repo

SUBMITTER: Liu E 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9799287 | biostudies-literature | 2022

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature