Mapping the Evolution of Scientific Fields

Mark Herrera, David C Roberts and Natali Gulbahce

PLOS ONE, 2010, vol. 5, issue 5, 1-6

Abstract: Despite the apparent cross-disciplinary interactions among scientific fields, a formal description of their evolution is lacking. Here we describe a novel approach to study the dynamics and evolution of scientific fields using a network-based analysis. We build an idea network consisting of American Physical Society Physics and Astronomy Classification Scheme (PACS) numbers as nodes representing scientific concepts. Two PACS numbers are linked if there exist publications that reference them simultaneously. We locate scientific fields using a community finding algorithm, and describe the time evolution of these fields over the course of 1985–2006. The communities we identify map to known scientific fields, and their age depends on their size and activity. We expect our approach to quantifying the evolution of ideas to be relevant for making predictions about the future of science and thus help to guide its development.

Date: 2010
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (13)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0010355 (text/html)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id= ... 10355&type=printable (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pone00:0010355

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0010355

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in PLOS ONE from Public Library of Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by plosone ().