FORKING PATHS OF CULTURAL COMPLEXITY: A CASE STUDY OF RESEARCH PARADIGMS

Joshua Borycz (), Benjamin D. Horne () and R. Alexander Bentley
Additional contact information
Joshua Borycz: Stevenson Science and Engineering Library, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN 37203, USA
Benjamin D. Horne: School of Information Sciences, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN, 37996, USA
R. Alexander Bentley: Anthropology Department, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN 37996, USA

Advances in Complex Systems (ACS), 2022, vol. 25, issue 05n06, 1-16

Abstract: Evolutionary studies of cultural complexity often assume that group members select the best information available in the group, effectively diffusing the best innovations, whose advantages are subsequently passed on to the next generation. This would seem to describe the ideal of the scientific process — each cohort of papers in a field surfacing the best innovations, refining them and passing on to the next “layer†or cohort of scientific works. Here, we use academic journal databases to explore this “forking†(branching) process in the evolution of a scientific paradigm. We apply citation network visualization and Latent Dirichlet allocation topic analysis to three different paradigms defined pragmatically as the set of papers citing a highly influential paper in each respective case. Our three case studies indicate a founder effect in how the seminal paper is highly-embedded in the citation network, and yet peripheral to the evolution of topics in subsequent “layers†of publications within the paradigm. This and additional evidence suggest certain topics are selected and followed, while others are left behind. From these case studies, we discuss how hitherto undeveloped ideas of the past might be located in the topic space of seminal works of the same fruitful time period.

Keywords: Branching evolution; science of science; bibliometrics; computational social science; cultural evolution (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.worldscientific.com/doi/abs/10.1142/S0219525922400045
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers

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:wsi:acsxxx:v:25:y:2022:i:05n06:n:s0219525922400045

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from

DOI: 10.1142/S0219525922400045

Access Statistics for this article

Advances in Complex Systems (ACS) is currently edited by Frank Schweitzer

More articles in Advances in Complex Systems (ACS) from World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Tai Tone Lim ().