Regensburg 2022 – wissenschaftliches Programm
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SOE: Fachverband Physik sozio-ökonomischer Systeme
SOE 14: Computational Social Science
SOE 14.4: Vortrag
Mittwoch, 7. September 2022, 16:15–16:30, H11
Loss of sustainability in scientific work — •Niklas Reisz1, Vito Domenico Pietro Servedio1, Vittorio Loreto1,2,3, William Schueller2, Márcia Ferreira1, and Stefan Thurner1,4,5 — 1Complexity Science Hub Vienna, Vienna, Austria — 2Sony Computer Science Lab, Paris, France — 3Sapienza University, Rome, Italy — 4Medical University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria — 5Santa Fe Institute, Santa Fe, USA
For decades the number of scientific publications has been rapidly increasing, effectively out-dating knowledge at a tremendous rate. Only few scientific milestones remain relevant and continuously attract citations. Here we quantify how long scientific work remains being utilized, how long it takes before today's work is forgotten, and how milestone papers differ from those forgotten. To answer these questions, we study the complete temporal citation network of all APS journals. We quantify the probability of attracting citations for individual publications. We capture both aspects, the forgetting and the tendency to cite already popular works, in a microscopic generative model. We find that the probability of citing a specific paper declines with age as a power law with an exponent of a=-1.4. Whenever a paper in its early years can be characterized by a scaling exponent above a critical value, ac, the paper is likely to become "ever-lasting". We validate the model with out-of-sample predictions. The model also allows us to predict that 95% of papers cited in 2050 have yet to be published. Our findings suggest a worrying tendency toward information overload and raises concerns about scientific publishing's long-term sustainability.