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Population modeling of the emergence and development of scientific fields

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Abstract

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.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Los Alamos National Laboratory, Theoretical Division, T-7 MS B284, Los Alamos, USA

    Luís M. A. Bettencourt & Jasleen Kaur

  2. Center for Theoretical Physics, Laboratory for Nuclear Science, Department of Physics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, USA

    David I. Kaiser

  3. School of Informatics, Indiana University, Bloomington, USA

    Jasleen Kaur

  4. Department of Mathematics and Statistics, Arizona State University, Tempe, USA

    Carlos Castillo-Chávez

  5. US Department of Energy, Office of Scientific and Technical Information, Oak Ridge, USA

    David E. Wojick

  6. Santa Fe Institute, 1399 Hyde Park Road, Santa Fe, NM, 87501, USA

    Luís M. A. Bettencourt

Authors
  1. Luís M. A. Bettencourt
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  2. David I. Kaiser
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  3. Jasleen Kaur
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  4. Carlos Castillo-Chávez
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  5. David E. Wojick
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Correspondence to Luís M. A. Bettencourt.

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Bettencourt, L.M.A., Kaiser, D.I., Kaur, J. et al. Population modeling of the emergence and development of scientific fields. Scientometrics 75, 495–518 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-007-1888-4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-007-1888-4

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