Title
Allometric Scaling in Scientific Fields.
Abstract
Allometric scaling can reflect underlying mechanisms, dynamics and structures in complex systems; examples include typical scaling laws in biology, ecology and urban development. In this work, we study allometric scaling in scientific fields. By performing an analysis of the outputs/inputs of various scientific fields, including the numbers of publications, citations, and references, with respect to the number of authors, we find that in all fields that we have studied thus far, including physics, mathematics and economics, there are allometric scaling laws relating the outputs/inputs and the sizes of scientific fields. Furthermore, the exponents of the scaling relations have remained quite stable over the years. We also find that the deviations of individual subfields from the overall scaling laws are good indicators for ranking subfields independently of their sizes.
Year
DOI
Venue
2017
10.1007/s11192-017-2333-y
Scientometrics
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Allometric scaling law, Subject classification code, PACS, MSC, JEL
Journal
abs/1702.05671
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
1
1588-2861
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
7
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Hongguang Dong100.34
Menghui Li281.52
Ru Liu300.34
Chensheng Wu440.79
Jinshan Wu5237.62