on the growth of scientific knowledge yeast biology as a case study科学知识的增长酵母生物学作为一个案例研究.pdfVIP

On the Growth of Scientific Knowledge: Yeast Biology as a Case Study 1 2 Xionglei He *, Jianzhi Zhang * 1 State Key Laboratory of Biocontrol, School of Life Sciences, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, China, 2 Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan, United States of America Abstract The tempo and mode of human knowledge expansion is an enduring yet poorly understood topic. Through a temporal network analysis of three decades of discoveries of protein interactions and genetic interactions in baker’s yeast, we show that the growth of scientific knowledge is exponential over time and that important subjects tend to be studied earlier. However, expansions of different domains of knowledge are highly heterogeneous and episodic such that the temporal turnover of knowledge hubs is much greater than expected by chance. Familiar subjects are preferentially studied over new subjects, leading to a reduced pace of innovation. While research is increasingly done in teams, the number of discoveries per researcher is greater in smaller teams. These findings reveal collective human behaviors in scientific research and help design better strategies in future knowledge exploration. Citation: He X, Zhang J (2009) On the Growth of Scientific Knowledge: Yeast Biology as a Case Study. PLoS Comput Biol 5(3): e1000320. doi:10.1371/ journal.pcbi.1000320 Editor: Andrey Rzhetsky, University of Chicago, United States of America Received September 16, 2008; Accepted February 5, 2009; Published March 20, 2009 Copyright: 2009 He, Zhang. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.