TY - JOUR
T1 - Population modeling of the emergence and development of scientific fields
AU - Bettencourt, Luís M A
AU - Kaiser, David I.
AU - Kaur, Jasleen
AU - Castillo-Chavez, Carlos
AU - Wojick, David E.
N1 - Funding Information:
We thank Aric Hagberg for stimulating discussions. This work has been partially supported by the Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI) of the U.S. Department of Energy. DIK was also supported in part by funds provided by the U.S. Department of Energy under cooperative research agreement DEFG02-05ER41360.
PY - 2008/6
Y1 - 2008/6
N2 - 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 are characterized by simple scaling laws relating numbers of new publications to new authors, with exponents that reflect increasing or decreasing returns in scientific productivity.
AB - 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 are characterized by simple scaling laws relating numbers of new publications to new authors, with exponents that reflect increasing or decreasing returns in scientific productivity.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=54749144719&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=54749144719&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1007/s11192-007-1888-4
DO - 10.1007/s11192-007-1888-4
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:54749144719
SN - 0138-9130
VL - 75
SP - 495
EP - 518
JO - Scientometrics
JF - Scientometrics
IS - 3
ER -