Research institutions provide the infrastructure for scientific discovery, yet their role in the production of knowledge is not well characterized. To address this gap, we analyze interactions of researchers within and between institutions from millions of scientific papers. Our analysis reveals that the number of collaborations scales superlinearly with institution size, though at different rates (heterogeneous densification). We also find that the number of institutions scales with the number of researchers as a power law (Heaps' law) and institution sizes approximate Zipf's law. These patterns can be reproduced by a simple model with three mechanisms: (i) researchers collaborate with friends-of-friends, (ii) new institutions trigger more potential institutions, and (iii) researchers are preferentially hired by large institutions. This model reveals an economy of scale in research: larger institutions grow faster and amplify collaborations. Our work provides a new understanding of emergent behavior in research institutions and how they facilitate innovation.
This paper investigates the impact of institutes and papers over time based on the heterogeneous institution-citation network. A new model, IPRank, is introduced to measure the impact of institution and paper simultaneously. This model utilises the heterogeneous structural measure method to unveil the impact of institution and paper, reflecting the effects of citation, institution, and structural measure. To evaluate the performance, the model first constructs a heterogeneous institution-citation network based on the American Physical Society (APS) dataset. Subsequently, PageRank is used to qu…
In explaining altruistic cooperation and punishment, the challenging riddle is how transcendental rules can emerge within the empirical world. Game-theoretical studies showed that pool punishment, particularly second-order punishment, plays a key role in understanding the evolution of cooperation. Second-order pool punishment, however, is tautological in nature; the punishment system itself is caused by its own effects. The emergence of pool punishment poses a logical conundrum that, to date, has been overlooked in the study of the evolution of social norms and institutions. Here, we tackle th…
Peer punishment of free-riders (defectors) is a key mechanism for promoting cooperation in society. However, it is highly unstable since some cooperators may contribute to a common project but refuse to punish defectors. Centralized sanctioning institutions (for example, tax-funded police and criminal courts) can solve this problem by punishing both defectors and cooperators who refuse to punish. These institutions have been shown to emerge naturally through social learning and then displace all other forms of punishment, including peer punishment. However, this result provokes a number of que…
Models of interacting social agents often represent agents as very simple entities having a small number of degrees of freedom, as exemplified by binary opinion models for instance. Understanding how such simple individual characteristics may emerge from potentially much more complex agents is thus a natural question. It has been proposed recently in [E. Bertin, P. Jensen, C.R. Phys. 20, 329 (2019)] that some types of interactions among agents with many internal degrees of freedom may lead to a `simplification' of agents, which are then effectively described by a small number of internal degre…
Research and development at the nanoscale requires a large degree of integration, from convergence of research disciplines in new fields of enquiry to new linkages between start-ups, regional actors and research facilities. Based on the analysis of two clusters in nanotechnologies (MESA+ (Twente) and other centres in The Netherlands and Minatec in Grenoble in France), the paper discusses the phenomenon of technological agglomeration: co-located scientific and technological fields associated to coordinated technology platforms to some extent actively shaped by institutional entrepreneurs. Such …
Research collaborations provide the foundation for scientific advances, but we have only recently begun to understand how they form and grow on a global scale. Here we analyze a model of the growth of research collaboration networks to explain the empirical observations that the number of collaborations scales superlinearly with institution size, though at different rates (heterogeneous densification), the number of institutions grows as a power of the number of researchers (Heaps' law) and institution sizes approximate Zipf's law. This model has three mechanisms: (i) researchers are preferent…
This article explores the emergence of knowledge from scientific discoveries and their effects on the structure of scientific communication. Network analysis is applied to understand this emergence institutionally as changes in the journals; semantically, as changes in the codification of meaning in terms of words; and cognitively as the new knowledge becomes the emergent foundation of further developments. The discovery of fullerenes in 1985 is analyzed as the scientific discovery that triggered a process which led to research in nanotubes.
How do shared conventions emerge in complex decentralized social systems? This question engages fields as diverse as linguistics, sociology and cognitive science. Previous empirical attempts to solve this puzzle all presuppose that formal or informal institutions, such as incentives for global agreement, coordinated leadership, or aggregated information about the population, are needed to facilitate a solution. Evolutionary theories of social conventions, by contrast, hypothesize that such institutions are not necessary in order for social conventions to form. However, empirical tests of this …
Many real-world networks exhibit degree-assortativity, with nodes of similar degree more likely to link to one another. Particularly in social networks, the contribution to the total assortativity varies with degree, featuring a distinctive peak slightly past the average degree. The way traditional models imprint assortativity on top of pre-defined topologies is via degree-preserving link permutations, which however destroy the particular graph's hierarchical traits of clustering. Here, we propose the first generative model which creates heterogeneous networks with scale-free-like properties a…
The emergence due to the outbreak of the COVID-19 disease, caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus, suddenly erupted at the beginning of 2020 in China and soon spread worldwide. This has caused an outstanding increase on research about the virus itself and, more in general, epidemics in many scientific fields. In this work we focus on the dynamics of the epidemic spreading and how it can be affected by the individual variability in compliance with social norms, i.e., in the adoption of health and hygienic social norms by population's members.
The world's collective knowledge is evolving through research and new scientific discoveries. It is becoming increasingly difficult to objectively rank the impact research institutes have on global advancements. However, since the funding, governmental support, staff and students quality all mirror the projected quality of the institution, it becomes essential to measure the affiliation's rating in a transparent and widely accepted way. We propose and investigate several methods to rank affiliations based on the number of their accepted papers at future academic conferences. We carry out our i…
Evolutionary game theory is one of the key paradigms behind many scientific disciplines from science to engineering. Previous studies proposed a strategy updating mechanism, which successfully demonstrated that the scale-free network can provide a framework for the emergence of cooperation. Instead, individuals in random graphs and small-world networks do not favor cooperation under this updating rule. However, a recent empirical result shows the heterogeneous networks do not promote cooperation when humans play a Prisoner's Dilemma. In this paper, we propose a strategy updating rule with payo…
Being able to rapidly recognise new research trends is strategic for many stakeholders, including universities, institutional funding bodies, academic publishers and companies. The literature presents several approaches to identifying the emergence of new research topics, which rely on the assumption that the topic is already exhibiting a certain degree of popularity and consistently referred to by a community of researchers. However, detecting the emergence of a new research area at an embryonic stage, i.e., before the topic has been consistently labelled by a community of researchers and ass…
Bridging Through Absence: How Comeback Researchers Bridge Knowledge Gaps Through Structural Re-emergence
University College Cork（都柏林大学学院）；Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；Indian Institute of Information Technology（印度信息科技大学）；Techno India University（Techno India大学）
Structural inequalities persist in society, conferring systematic advantages to some people at the expense of others, for example, by giving them substantially more influence and opportunities. Using bibliometric data about authors of scientific publications, we identify two types of structural inequalities in scientific citations. First, female authors, who represent a minority of researchers, receive less recognition for their work (through citations) relative to male authors; second, authors affiliated with top-ranked institutions, who are also a minority, receive substantially more recogni…
