The role of mainstreamness and interdisciplinarity for the relevance of scientific papers
Is it possible to tell how interdisciplinary and out-of-the-box scientific papers are, or which papers are mainstream? Here we use the bibliographic coupling network, derived from all physics papers that were published in the Physical Review journals in the past century, to try to identify them as m...
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sg-ntu-dr.10356-1470842023-02-28T19:53:37Z The role of mainstreamness and interdisciplinarity for the relevance of scientific papers Thurner, Stefan Liu, Wenyuan Klimek, Peter Cheong, Siew Ann School of Physical and Mathematical Sciences Science::Physics Citation Analysis Entropy Is it possible to tell how interdisciplinary and out-of-the-box scientific papers are, or which papers are mainstream? Here we use the bibliographic coupling network, derived from all physics papers that were published in the Physical Review journals in the past century, to try to identify them as mainstream, out-of-the-box, or interdisciplinary. We show that the network clusters into scientific fields. The position of individual papers with respect to these clusters allows us to estimate their degree of mainstreamness or interdisciplinarity. We show that over the past decades the fraction of mainstream papers increases, the fraction of out-of-the-box decreases, and the fraction of interdisciplinary papers remains constant. Studying the rewards of papers, we find that in terms of absolute citations, both, mainstream and interdisciplinary papers are rewarded. In the long run, mainstream papers perform less than interdisciplinary ones in terms of citation rates. We conclude that to avoid a unilateral trend towards mainstreamness a new incentive scheme is necessary. Published version 2021-03-24T08:53:22Z 2021-03-24T08:53:22Z 2020 Journal Article Thurner, S., Liu, W., Klimek, P. & Cheong, S. A. (2020). The role of mainstreamness and interdisciplinarity for the relevance of scientific papers. PloS One, 15(4). https://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0230325 1932-6203 https://hdl.handle.net/10356/147084 10.1371/journal.pone.0230325 32240189 2-s2.0-85082743870 4 15 en PloS One © 2020 The Author(s). This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. application/pdf |
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Science::Physics Citation Analysis Entropy Thurner, Stefan Liu, Wenyuan Klimek, Peter Cheong, Siew Ann The role of mainstreamness and interdisciplinarity for the relevance of scientific papers |
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Is it possible to tell how interdisciplinary and out-of-the-box scientific papers are, or which papers are mainstream? Here we use the bibliographic coupling network, derived from all physics papers that were published in the Physical Review journals in the past century, to try to identify them as mainstream, out-of-the-box, or interdisciplinary. We show that the network clusters into scientific fields. The position of individual papers with respect to these clusters allows us to estimate their degree of mainstreamness or interdisciplinarity. We show that over the past decades the fraction of mainstream papers increases, the fraction of out-of-the-box decreases, and the fraction of interdisciplinary papers remains constant. Studying the rewards of papers, we find that in terms of absolute citations, both, mainstream and interdisciplinary papers are rewarded. In the long run, mainstream papers perform less than interdisciplinary ones in terms of citation rates. We conclude that to avoid a unilateral trend towards mainstreamness a new incentive scheme is necessary. |
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School of Physical and Mathematical Sciences |
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School of Physical and Mathematical Sciences Thurner, Stefan Liu, Wenyuan Klimek, Peter Cheong, Siew Ann |
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Article |
author |
Thurner, Stefan Liu, Wenyuan Klimek, Peter Cheong, Siew Ann |
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Thurner, Stefan |
title |
The role of mainstreamness and interdisciplinarity for the relevance of scientific papers |
title_short |
The role of mainstreamness and interdisciplinarity for the relevance of scientific papers |
title_full |
The role of mainstreamness and interdisciplinarity for the relevance of scientific papers |
title_fullStr |
The role of mainstreamness and interdisciplinarity for the relevance of scientific papers |
title_full_unstemmed |
The role of mainstreamness and interdisciplinarity for the relevance of scientific papers |
title_sort |
role of mainstreamness and interdisciplinarity for the relevance of scientific papers |
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2021 |
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https://hdl.handle.net/10356/147084 |
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