TY - JOUR
T1 - Quantifying the diaspora of knowledge in the last century
AU - De Domenico, Manlio
AU - Omodei, Elisa
AU - Arenas, Alex
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2016, The Author(s).
PY - 2016/12/1
Y1 - 2016/12/1
N2 - Academic research is driven by several factors causing different disciplines to act as “sources” or “sinks” of knowledge. However, how the flow of authors’ research interests – a proxy of human knowledge – evolved across time is still poorly understood. Here, we build a comprehensive map of such flows across one century, revealing fundamental periods in the raise of interest in areas of human knowledge. We identify and quantify the most attractive topics over time, when a relatively significant number of researchers moved from their original area to another one, causing what we call a “diaspora of the knowledge” towards sinks of scientific interest, and we relate these points to crucial historical and political events. Noticeably, only a few areas – like Medicine, Physics or Chemistry – mainly act as sources of the diaspora, whereas areas like Material Science, Chemical Engineering, Neuroscience, Immunology and Microbiology or Environmental Science behave like sinks.
AB - Academic research is driven by several factors causing different disciplines to act as “sources” or “sinks” of knowledge. However, how the flow of authors’ research interests – a proxy of human knowledge – evolved across time is still poorly understood. Here, we build a comprehensive map of such flows across one century, revealing fundamental periods in the raise of interest in areas of human knowledge. We identify and quantify the most attractive topics over time, when a relatively significant number of researchers moved from their original area to another one, causing what we call a “diaspora of the knowledge” towards sinks of scientific interest, and we relate these points to crucial historical and political events. Noticeably, only a few areas – like Medicine, Physics or Chemistry – mainly act as sources of the diaspora, whereas areas like Material Science, Chemical Engineering, Neuroscience, Immunology and Microbiology or Environmental Science behave like sinks.
KW - Big data
KW - Complex networks
KW - Diffusion
KW - Human knowledge
KW - Interconnected networks
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85034800348&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1007/s41109-016-0017-9
DO - 10.1007/s41109-016-0017-9
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85034800348
SN - 2364-8228
VL - 1
JO - Applied Network Science
JF - Applied Network Science
IS - 1
M1 - 15
ER -