The Biographies of Scientific Ideas: What the Content and Structure of Citations Reveal About the Diffusion of Knowledge

目前，每年发表的学术文章超过100万篇。了解这些期刊文章（通常是科学研究的主要单位）如何随着时间的推移被科学界消耗，对于理解知识的产生和传播至关重要。传统上，衡量科学研究影响的主要策略是计算被引用的次数。这种方法的核心问题是，引文计数不区分引文的上下文（例如，肯定的、批评的和象征性的区别），也不考虑引文的来源（例如，来自领域专家的100个详细参考文献和来自非专业人士的100个礼仪性提及之间的区别）。因此，引用计数很少揭示研究人员如何实际使用和解释现有知识，这直接阻碍了我们有意义地衡量科学研究影响的能力。该项目通过系统地检查一组种子出版物如何被一组潜在关联的引用出版物合并、提炼和扩展，从而对知识如何积累产生了新的见解。这需要编制一个大型的纵向数据集，包括重点文章及其引用历史，然后将其作为生活史进行分析。方法策略是定量和定性方法（引文上下文分析、共被引分析、引文网络分析）的独特结合，允许对与时间、解释、受众和学科背景相关的问题进行“深度描述”。这个项目的重点是来自两个学科的旗舰期刊文章的大样本：社会学和医学。因此，研究结果将为长期存在的关于“硬”科学与“软”科学之间知识如何积累的问题提供信息。此外，研究医学发现的传播和整合对卫生政策制定者具有实际意义，解决了最近关于临床研究在医学研究界通常不受挑战的说法。最后，该项目产生的数据为研究创新、网络和社会影响的扩散创造了新的机会。首先，通过跟踪同一时间发表的一组论文，该研究避免了对“获胜”创新的回顾性抽样。其次，对于每一篇种子文章，其采用者的时间线和连通性可以通过直接引用链接和共被引链接直接映射。第三，与大多数采用数据（如销售数据）不同，引文选择让我们了解创新是如何被采用的。引文的内容提供了新的数据，表明一些引文者在宣传创新的某些方面是否比其他引文者更有影响力。更广泛的影响这项历史研究的目的是对科学进步实际上需要什么产生新的见解。考察思想是如何被使用和整合的，为评估科学知识积累的逻辑和效率提供了基础。从长远来看，这些见解将有助于制定衡量标准，以描述科学领域每年提出的无数“新”思想的使用价值。因此，该项目促进了以经验为基础的新工具的创建，科学和创新政策制定者可以使用这些工具来衡量研究出版物和个别学者的科学影响。

Currently, more than a million scholarly articles are published per year. Understanding how these journal articles, often the primary unit of scientific research, are consumed over time by the scientific community is essential to understanding the production and dissemination of knowledge. Conventionally, the main strategy used to gauge the impact of scientific research is to count the number of citations received. The central problem with this approach is that citation counts do not distinguish between the context of the citation (e.g., the difference between positive, critical, and symbolic) nor do they consider the source of the citation (e.g., the difference between 100 detailed references from area experts and 100 ceremonial mentions from non-specialists). Citation counts thus reveal very little about how researchers actually use and interpret existing knowledge, which directly impedes our ability to meaningfully gauge the impact of scientific research. This project develops new insight into how knowledge accumulates by systematically examining how a set of seed publications are incorporated, distilled, and expanded upon by a set of potentially connected citing publications. This entails compiling a large, longitudinal dataset of focal articles and their citation histories, which will then be analyzed as life histories. The methodological strategy is a unique combination of quantitative and qualitative approaches (citation context analysis, co-citation analysis, citation network analysis) that allows for the "thick description" of issues related to time, interpretation, audience, and disciplinary context. This project focuses on a large sample of flagship journal articles from two disciplines: sociology and medicine. The results will thus inform long-standing questions about how knowledge accumulates in the 'hard' versus 'soft' sciences. In addition, studying the diffusion and incorporation of medical findings has practical implications for health policy makers, addressing recent claims that clinical research studies typically go unchallenged in the medical research community. Finally, the data generated from this project create new opportunities to study the diffusion of innovations, networks, and social influence. First, by following a cohort of papers published at the same time, the research avoids retrospective sampling on "winning" innovations. Second, for each seed article, the timeline and connectedness of its adopters can be directly mapped via direct citation links as well as co-citation links. Third, unlike most kinds of adoption data (e.g., sales data), citation choices give us some insight into how an innovation was adopted. The content of the citation provides new data on whether some citers are more influential than others in publicizing certain aspects of an innovation. Broader ImpactsThis historical study is designed to produce new insights into what advancement in science actually entails. Examining how ideas are used and incorporated provides a foundation for evaluating the logic and efficiency of knowledge accumulation in science. In the long-term, these insights will enable the development of metrics that describe the use-value of the myriad "new" ideas put forth each year in science. The project thus facilitates the creation of new empirically grounded tools that science and innovation policy makers can use to gauge the scientific impact of research publications and individual scholars.