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Even as we advance the frontiers of physics knowledge, our understanding of how this knowledge evolves remains at the descriptive levels of Popper and Kuhn. Using the APS publications data sets, we ask in this letter how new knowledge is built upon old knowledge. We do so by constructing year-to-year bibliographic coupling networks, and identify in them validated communities that represent different research fields. We then visualize their evolutionary relationships in the form of alluvial diagrams, and show how they remain intact through APS journal splits. Quantitatively, we see that most fields undergo weak Popperian mixing, and it is rare for a field to remain isolated/undergo strong mixing. The sizes of fields obey a simple linear growth with recombination. We can also reliably predict the merging between two fields, but not for the considerably more complex splitting. Finally, we report a case study of two fields that underwent repeated merging and splitting around 1995, and how these Kuhnian events are correlated with breakthroughs on BEC, quantum teleportation, and slow light. This impact showed up quantitatively in the citations of the BEC field as a larger proportion of references from during and shortly after these events.
The paper is dedicated to 25th anniversary of Condensed Matter Physics journal (CMP). It contains the results of comprehensive analysis of different journal-related data. CMP co-authorship relationships are studied analysing the collaboration network
In the book The Essential Tension Thomas Kuhn described the conflict between tradition and innovation in scientific research --i.e., the desire to explore new promising areas, counterposed to the need to capitalize on the work done in the past. While
The advancement of science as outlined by Popper and Kuhn is largely qualitative, but with bibliometric data it is possible and desirable to develop a quantitative picture of scientific progress. Furthermore it is also important to allocate finite re
In the last years complex networks tools contributed to provide insights on the structure of research, through the study of collaboration, citation and co-occurrence networks. The network approach focuses on pairwise relationships, often compressing
Although interdisciplinarity is often touted as a necessity for modern research, the evidence on the relative impact of sectorial versus to interdisciplinary science is qualitative at best. In this paper we leverage the bibliographic data set of the