Collaborative Research: Modeling the Invention, Dissemination, and Translation of Scientific Concepts

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Scientific advance rests on discovery, dissemination, and translation. And yet, most discoveries fail to get noticed and have practical relevance. Nearly every university, discipline, foundation, government and company would like to know not just how to facilitate the creation of new scientific ideas, but how to get those ideas to spread and relate to practical issues in the world. To address such challenges, this research follows leading philosophers of science who argue that scientific concepts are the basic unit of knowledge, and it is there people observe scientific revolutions and advance. This research identifies scientific concepts using natural language processing techniques. With concepts in hand, it intends to model their interrelation in documents as forming an accumulated knowledge network to which every new publication's conceptual relations can be compared. Through comparison one will identify conceptual discoveries as the arrival of new concepts and conceptual relations. Results from this project will inform a variety of stakeholders concerned with intellectual innovation. The findings will have practical relevance by identifying where and when scholars make creative intellectual contributions, contributions that garner wider attention and reception in fields and domains far afield from academe. It will also identify levers for facilitating more rapid forms of discovery, dissemination and translation. Findings from this research will thus have direct relevance to decisions by academics, government agencies, and non-governmental organizations trying to accelerate scientific advance. Specifically, this research conducts three interrelated projects that identify the social conditions giving rise to concept discovery, dissemination, and translation. The first study asks what are the conditions that give rise to scientific discoveries like new concepts and new conceptual relations? Here the project identifies ecological conditions, resources, and demographic compositions that enable forms of conceptual creativity. The second study follows concepts over time and seeks to understand how they garner attention. Notably, only some conceptual discoveries actually spread and get repeatedly used. What are the initial conditions surrounding a concept's creation that predicts its entire career? Here, the project intends to study new concepts and new concept linkages, and it will look at their staging (start) and implementation (preceding moment) practices so as to determine what drives the heightened usage of some concepts over others. The third study will follow concepts as they spread beyond their discipline and to domains outside of academia. There the project analyzes how concepts translate across fields, or how they move from basic research applications to applied ones such as those found in patents. It also asks how scientific concepts get archived as accepted knowledge in encyclopedia such as Wikipedia. What leads an idea to go from theory, to applied use, to public acceptance? Again, are there ecological conditions and socio-cultural resources that enable an idea to move across social domains? This research will generate and share unique linked data, and it will create new empirical models and extensions of theory that will shift the way scholars conceive of scientific advance.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.