Title
Population modeling of the emergence and development of scientific fields
Abstract
We analyze the temporal evolution of emerging fields within several scientific disciplines in terms of numbers of authors and publications. From bibliographic searches we construct databases of authors, papers, and their dates of publication. We show that the temporal development of each field, while different in detail, is well described by population contagion models, suitably adapted from epidemiology to reflect the dynamics of scientific interaction. Dynamical parameters are estimated and discussed to reflect fundamental characteristics of the field, such as time of apprenticeship and recruitment rate. We also show that fields tire characterized by simple scaling laws relating numbers of new publications to new authors, with exponents that reflect increasing or decreasing returns in scientific productivity.
Year
DOI
Venue
2008
10.1007/s11192-007-1888-4
Scientometrics
Keywords
Field
DocType
Influenza,Carbon Nanotubes,Scientific Field,Scrapie,H5N1 Influenza
Data science,Population,Data mining,Apprenticeship,Computer science,Epistemology,Scientific method,Scaling law,Scientific productivity
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
75
3
0138-9130
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
37
2.93
5
Authors
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Luís M. A. Bettencourt1949.47
David I. Kaiser2634.61
Jasleen Kaur337636.29
C. Castillo-Chavez4404.62
David E. Wojick5403.41