Increasing trend of scientists to switch between topics

Abstract

We analyze the publication records of individual scientists, aiming to quantify the topic switching dynamics of scientists and its influence. For each scientist, the relations among her publications are characterized via shared references. We find that the co-citing network of the papers of a scientist exhibits a clear community structure where each major community represents a research topic. Our analysis suggests that scientists tend to have a narrow distribution of the number of topics. However, researchers nowadays switch more frequently between topics than those in the early days. We also find that high switching probability in early career (<12y) is associated with low overall productivity, while it is correlated with high overall productivity in latter career. Interestingly, the average citation per paper, however, is in all career stages negatively correlated with the switching probability. We propose a model with exploitation and exploration mechanisms that can explain the main observed features.

37 pages, 21 figures

References in corpus (17)

• Fast unfolding of communities in large networks
• An index to quantify an individual's scientific research output
• Fast algorithm for detecting community structure in networks
• Maps of random walks on complex networks reveal community structure
• The Product Space Conditions the Development of Nations
• Statistical Mechanics of Community Detection
• How to project a bipartite network?
• Reputation and Impact in Academic Careers
• Collective credit allocation in science
• Hot Streaks in Artistic, Cultural, and Scientific Careers
• Persistence and Uncertainty in the Academic Career
• Limited resolution in complex network community detection with Potts model approach
• Career on the Move: Geography, Stratification, and Scientific Impact
• Quantifying patterns of research interest evolution
• Network dynamics of innovation processes
• Quantifying the impact of weak, strong, and super ties in scientific careers
• Estimating the resolution limit of the map equation in community detection

Cited by in corpus (14)

• Scientific elite revisited: Patterns of productivity, collaboration, authorship and impact
• Understanding the onset of hot streaks across artistic, cultural, and scientific careers
• Impactful scientists have higher tendency to involve collaborators in new topics
• Become a better you: correlation between the change of research direction and the change of scientific performance
• Quantifying the rise and fall of scientific fields
• Is Coronavirus-Related Research Becoming More Interdisciplinary? A Perspective of Co-occurrence Analysis and Diversity Measure of Scientific Articles
• Collaboration and topic switches in science
• Measuring similarity in co-occurrence data using ego-networks
• Finding Scientific Communities In Citation Graphs: Convergent Clustering
• Impact of individual actions on the collective response of social systems
• Dynamics of senses of new physics discourse: co-keywords analysis
• Unexpected advantages of exploitation for target searches in complex networks
• Research Method Usage across Academic Ages in Library and Information Science: An Empirical Study (1990-2023)
• Conservative adventurers have more future academic impact