Abstract
Lock-in and path-dependency are well-known concepts in economics dealing with unbalanced development of alternative options. Lock-in was studied in various sectors, considering production or consumption sides. Lock-in in academic research went little addressed. Yet, science develops through knowledge accumulation and cross-fertilisation of research topics, that could lead to similar phenomena when some topics do not sufficiently benefit from accumulation mechanisms, reducing innovation opportunities from the concerned field consequently. We introduce an original method to explore these phenomena by comparing topic trajectories in research fields according to strong or weak accumulative processes over time. We combine the concepts of ‘niche’ and ‘mainstream’ from transition studies with scientometric tools to revisit Callon’s strategic diagram with a diachronic perspective of topic clusters over time. Considering the trajectories of semantic clusters, derived from titles and authors’ keywords extracted from scholarly publications in the Web of Science, we applied our method to two competing research fields in food sciences and technology related to pulses and soya over the last 60 years worldwide. These highly interesting species for the sustainability of agrifood systems experienced unbalanced development and thus is under-debated. Our analysis confirms that food research for soya was more dynamic than for pulses: soya topic clusters revealed a stronger accumulative research path by cumulating mainstream positions while pulses research did not meet the same success. This attempt to unpack research lock-in for evaluating the competition dynamics of scientific fields over time calls for future works, by strengthening the method and testing it on other research fields.
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Brian Arthur defined technological lock-in as a situation where two technologies compete and over time one technology turns to be the dominant one on the market (through increasing return adoption mechanisms) unlike the other one could be more beneficial to society. Lock-in is the consequence of path-dependency. The path-dependency concept highlights the dependence to past/previous choices or investment while the lock-in concept highlights the inability of alternatives to develop or to compete “as equal/on par” as one technology turned to be the dominant one by benefiting more quickly of accumulation effects (ie. path-dependency).
The analysis of a scientific regime as defined in transition studies is beyond the scope of this study: considering the entire scientific regime requires to consider both the topics of knowledge and the actors contributing to shape them. In particular, this extended analysis would require to analyse the socio-semantic networks to understand which social networks are at the origin of new seamless knowledge topics that could be developed by connection with mainstream social networks, and then becoming new core topics that could serve a renewal of knowledge for sustainability issues.
As introduced by Chavalarias and Cointet (2013:1): “the concept of ‘‘phylomemetic network’’ is used by analogy to biological phylogenetic trees, which account for evolutionary relationships between genes. We do not make any assumption concerning the type of dynamics underlying the evolution and diffusion of terms. As such, contrarily to previous works in line with the memetics theory, which have already coined the term, we do not claim that cultural entities (memes) evolve following the same laws of selection as biological replicators (genes) do”.
Keywords Plus are keywords algorithmically added by the WoS and that differ from the author keywords.
The distribution of FST sub-themes (Allergy, Nutrition, Processing, Sensory Analysis) shows that the most important subtheme concerns processing methods and food applications, indexed for 83% of the records (32,376 records). Then comes the Nutrition subtheme, with 12975 records, Sensory Analysis with 4416 mentions and finally Allergy with 1594.
As abstracts were not available before 1991, we only considered terms from authors’ keywords and titles as units of analysis.
Note also that a large quantity of research publications is observed in the 1990s (as in the entire WoS Core collection) partly due to the inclusion, from 1990 on, of both abstracts and authors’ keywords when the WoS indexed records, leading therefore to larger sets of retrieved records, as explained in Sect. 3.
In one case an emerging cluster moved directly to the fading position for pulses (temporal series F in Fig. 12).
New paths can be hampered by the mechanism of “cognitive dissonance (…) between the potential of the new and the security of the old”, that is “ the greater the distance between a novel solution and the accepted one, the larger is the lock-in to previous tradition. And so a hysteresis—a delayed response to change—exists” (Arthur, 2009:139–140).
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Acknowledgements
The authors acknowledge Hugues Leiser and experts from Food Sciences and Technology who helped build search queries on the WoS and the thesaurus dictionary: Marie-Jo Amiot-Carlin, Marc Anton, Jean-Michel Chardigny, Valérie Micard, Christophe Nguyen-Thé, and Stéphane Walrand. We kindly thank the CorText team; Tristan Salord for his help on certain scripts; and Alice Thomson-Thibault for her helpful comments and English editing of the manuscript. We also thank an anonymous reviewer whose comments and suggestions helped sharpen the argument.
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This work was supported by funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under grant agreement No. 727672 LEGVALUE (Fostering sustainable legume-based farming systems and agri-feed and food chains in the EU); from the Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR) under grant number ANR-11-LABX-0066; and the Occitanie region in France.
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Conceptualisation, Data curation, Formal analysis: all authors. Funding acquisition: M-BM. Investigation: ML and M-BM. Methodology: all authors. Project administration, Resources: M-BM. Software: ML, GC. Supervision: M-BM and GC. Validation, Visualisation, Roles/Writing—original draft and Writing—review & editing: all authors.
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Lascialfari, M., Magrini, MB. & Cabanac, G. Unpacking research lock-in through a diachronic analysis of topic cluster trajectories in scholarly publications. Scientometrics 127, 6165–6189 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-022-04514-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-022-04514-3