No abstract

Communication of scientific findings is fundamental to scholarly discourse. In this article, we show that academic review articles, a quintessential form of interpretive scholarly output, perform curatorial work that substantially transforms the research communities they aim to summarize. Using a corpus of millions of journal articles, we analyze the consequences of review articles for the publications they cite, focusing on citation and co-citation as indicators of scholarly attention. Our analysis shows that, on the one hand, papers cited by formal review articles generally experience a dramatic loss in future citations. Typically, the review gets cited instead of the specific articles mentioned in the review. On the other hand, reviews curate, synthesize, and simplify the literature concerning a research topic. Most reviews identify distinct clusters of work and highlight exemplary bridges that integrate the topic as a whole. These bridging works, in addition to the review, become a shorthand characterization of the topic going forward and receive disproportionate attention. In this manner, formal reviews perform creative destruction so as to render increasingly expansive and redundant bodies of knowledge distinct and comprehensible.

Despite modernity's love affair with rationality and the precision that supports it, ambiguity persists not only in humor and politics but in all areas of contemporary life including scholarship and science. Here the authors explore how knowledge cultures differ in their precision of expression and the consequences of ambiguity for those cultures. They develop, estimate, and validate a model of ambiguous expression from large-scale publication data and then show that ambiguous scholarly language acts like a boundary object between researchers and their communities, drawing competing interpretations into conversation with one another as they build on it. Ambiguity, and the uncertainty that follows, stimulate social learning and so ironically play a crucial role in focusing modern knowledge and creating zones of social and intellectual engagement.

This chapter further develops an agent-based model of economic production from the previous chapter. It shows that certain limitations intrinsic to the original hypercycle model—in particular, complexity barriers and vulnerability to parasites—are overcome once autocatalysis takes place in a spatial context, rather than in random-topology liquids. Localized heterogeneity in spatial interaction induces the inscription of path dependencies into cells. This explains why life becomes enhanced once it is embodied. The model also demonstrates why altruism and stigmergy produce more complex rule-chemistries. Altruistic reproduction and stigmergy are superior to selfish reproduction and fixed environments, respectively, because of their superior capacities for self-repair. Beyond suggestive specifics, the hypercycle model and its extensions show how chemistry and economic production and trading in markets can be mapped onto each other, sparking insights for both sides.

The authors propose and illustrate an exploratory technique to shed light on the degree to which bivariate relations between individual-level variables themselves vary over a network. The authors discuss limitations and possible extensions.