The evolution of knowledge within and across fields in modern physics

Abstract

The exchange of knowledge across different areas and disciplines plays a key role in the process of knowledge creation, and can stimulate innovation and the emergence of new fields. We develop here a quantitative framework to extract significant dependencies among scientific disciplines and turn them into a time-varying network whose nodes are the different fields, while the weighted links represent the flow of knowledge from one field to another at a given period of time. Drawing on a comprehensive data set on scientific production in modern physics and on the patterns of citations between articles published in the various fields in the last 30 years, we are then able to map, over time, how the ideas developed in a given field in a certain time period have influenced later discoveries in the same field or in other fields. The analysis of knowledge flows internal to each field displays a remarkable variety of temporal behaviours, with some fields of physics showing to be more self-referential than others. The temporal networks of knowledge exchanges across fields reveal cases of one field continuously absorbing knowledge from another field in the entire observed period, pairs of fields mutually influencing each other, but also cases of evolution from absorbing to mutual or even to back-nurture behaviors.

The Evolution of Knowledge and Trends within the Building Energy Efficiency Field of Knowledge

“…According to Sun and Latora [111], the development of a field of knowledge is 4. Annual participation of the themes, followed by their trends.…”

“…According to Sun and Latora [111], the development of a field of knowledge is marked by the flow of knowledge between several themes or subareas of this field. That is why it is important to study the relationship between the themes.…”

Knotting the MECO Network

“…Indeed all these clouds floated in the sky still when MECO started its work. Schools, 1970 and One month earlier than the Battelle Colloquium a very important contact for 'moving and sharing knowledge' [27] was the Varenna School on Critical Phenomena in 1970 [28]. The most recent advances in the theory of phase transitions, the so-called critical phenomena, were presented by Kadanoff, Stanley, Fisher, Hohenberg, Jona-Lasino, and Di Castro (see Figure 3).…”

Anatomy of Complex System Research

“…Science of science offers us unprecedented opportunities to explore and uncover the citation dynamics [11][12][13], knowledge space [14], collaboration networks [7,8,15], and their association with societal impact [16,17]. Indeed, recent empirical work regarding knowledge flow and scientist mobility among academic fields have attracted much attention, including the field of artificial intelligence [18], subfields of physics [19][20][21], and science in general [22,23], together with the diffusion model [24].…”