Chaining and the temporal dynamics of scientists’ publishing behaviour
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Scientific progress, or scientific change, has been an important topic in the philosophy and history of science. Previous work has developed quantitative approaches to characterize the progression of science in different fields, but how individual scientists make progress through their careers is not well understood at a comprehensive scale. We characterize the regularity in the temporal dynamics of scientists' publishing behavior with computational algorithms that predict the historical emerging order of publications from individual scientists. We discover that scientists publish in ways following the processes of chaining that mirror those observed in historical word meaning extension, whereby novel ideas emerge by connecting to existing ideas that are proximal in semantic space. We report findings for predominant exemplar-based chaining that reconstructs the emerging order in the publications of 1,164 award-winning and random-sampled scientists from the fields of Physics, Chemistry, Medicine, Economics, and Computer Science over the past century. Our work provides large-scale evidence that scientists across different fields tend to share similar publishing behavior over time by taking incremental steps that build on their past research outputs.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".