Conceptual structure and the growth of scientific knowledge

Abstract

How does scientific knowledge grow? This question has occupied a central place in the philosophy of science, stimulating heated debates, but yielding no clear consensus. Many explanations can be understood in terms of whether and how they view the expansion of knowledge as proceeding through the accretion of scientific concepts into larger conceptual structures. Here, we examine these views empirically, performing a large-scale analysis of the physical and social sciences, spanning five decades. Using natural language processing techniques, we create semantic networks of concepts, wherein noun phrases become linked when used in the same paper abstract. For both the physical and social sciences, we observe increasingly rigid conceptual cores (i.e., densely connected sets of highly central nodes) accompanied by the proliferation of periphery concepts (i.e., sparsely connected nodes that are highly connected to the core). Subsequently, we examine the relationship between conceptual structure and the growth of scientific knowledge, finding that scientific works are more innovative in fields with cores that have higher conceptual churn and with larger cores. Furthermore, scientific consensus is associated with reduced conceptual churn and fewer conceptual cores. Overall, our findings suggest that while the organization of scientific concepts is important for the growth of knowledge, the mechanisms vary across time.

40 pages, 13 figures. Nat Hum Behav (2024)

References in corpus (10)

• The Journal Coverage of Web of Science and Scopus: a Comparative Analysis
• Who is the best connected scientist? A study of scientific coauthorship networks
• The Diversity-Innovation Paradox in Science
• Do disruption index indicators measure what they propose to measure? The comparison of several indicator variants with assessments by peers
• Finding multiple core-periphery pairs in networks
• Core-periphery structure requires something else in the network
• Serendipity and strategy in rapid innovation
• Conceptual structure and the growth of scientific knowledge
• Architecture and evolution of semantic networks in mathematics texts
• The emergent integrated network structure of scientific research

Cited by in corpus (1)

• Conceptual structure and the growth of scientific knowledge