TY - JOUR
AU - Gilbert, N.
AB - The contemporary structure of scientific activity, including the publication ofpapers in academic journals, citation behaviour, the clustering of research intospecialties and so on has been intensively studied over the last fifty years. Anumber of quantitative relationships between aspects of the system have beenobserved.This paper reports on a simulation designed to see whether it is possible toreproduce the form of these observed relationships using a small number ofsimple assumptions. The simulation succeeds in generating a specialty structurewith ‘areas’ of science displaying growth and decline. It also reproducesLotka's Law concerning the distribution of citations among authors.The simulation suggests that it is possible to generate many of the quantitativefeatures of the present structure of science and that one way of looking atscientific activity is as a system in which scientific papers generate furtherpapers, with authors (scientists) playing a necessary but incidental role. Thetheoretical implications of these suggestions are briefly explored.
TI - A Simulation of the Structure of Academic Science
JF - Sociological Research Online
DO - 10.5153/sro.85
DA - 1997-06-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/sage/a-simulation-of-the-structure-of-academic-science-TJ7C0EGuJd
SP - 91
EP - 105
VL - 2
IS - 2
DP - DeepDyve
ER -