论文标题
我们可以“感觉到”知识的温度？通过热力学对科学流行度进行建模
Can We `Feel' the Temperature of Knowledge? Modelling Scientific Popularity Dynamics via Thermodynamics
论文作者
论文摘要
就像自然界中的一切一样，科学主题蓬勃发展和灭亡。尽管现有文献很好地通过引文模式捕捉了文章的生命周期，但对特定主题的科学知名度和影响如何发展。如果我们可以“感觉到”主题的活动，那将是最直观的，就像我们认为天气温度一样。在这里，我们构思了知识温度，以量化主题通过引文网络动态的总体流行和影响。知识温度包括2个部分。一个部分通过与主题进化与同质扩张之间的类比评估知识积累来描述持久的影响。另一部分通过内部能量的熵变化速度变化，知识结构的时间变化，这是短期普及的实施例，2个热力学变量通过节点度和边缘数近似。我们对大小从1000到30000篇文章的代表性主题的分析表明，蓬勃发展的关键是主题累积有用信息的能力，以供未来的知识产生。当主题通过影响力的文章改变知识结构时，主题尤其会体验到温度的激增。当出现单一非平凡的新研究重点或在主题结构中合并时，尖峰尤其明显。总体而言，知识温度表现出主题的独特进化周期。
Just like everything in the nature, scientific topics flourish and perish. While existing literature well captures article's life-cycle via citation patterns, little is known about how scientific popularity and impact evolves for a specific topic. It would be most intuitive if we could `feel' topic's activity just as we perceive the weather by temperature. Here, we conceive knowledge temperature to quantify topic overall popularity and impact through citation network dynamics. Knowledge temperature includes 2 parts. One part depicts lasting impact by assessing knowledge accumulation with an analogy between topic evolution and isobaric expansion. The other part gauges temporal changes in knowledge structure, an embodiment of short-term popularity, through the rate of entropy change with internal energy, 2 thermodynamic variables approximated via node degree and edge number. Our analysis of representative topics with size ranging from 1000 to over 30000 articles reveals that the key to flourishing is topics' ability in accumulating useful information for future knowledge generation. Topics particularly experience temperature surges when their knowledge structure is altered by influential articles. The spike is especially obvious when there appears a single non-trivial novel research focus or merging in topic structure. Overall, knowledge temperature manifests topics' distinct evolutionary cycles.
