Do only major scientific breakthroughs hit the news and social media, or does a `catchy' title help to attract public attention? How strong is the connection between the importance of a scientific... Show moreDo only major scientific breakthroughs hit the news and social media, or does a `catchy' title help to attract public attention? How strong is the connection between the importance of a scientific paper and the (social) media attention it receives? In this study we investigate these questions by analysing the relationship between the observed attention and certain characteristics of scientific papers from two major multidisciplinary journals: Nature Communication (NC) and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). We describe papers by features based on the linguistic properties of their titles and centrality measures of their authors in their co-authorship network. We identify linguistic features and collaboration patterns that might be indicators for future attention, and are characteristic to different journals, research disciplines, and media sources. Show less
Using the complete Journal Citation Reports (Science Citation Index, SCI, and Social Sciences Citation Index, SSCI) during the period 1994-2016 as data, we address the question of change and... Show moreUsing the complete Journal Citation Reports (Science Citation Index, SCI, and Social Sciences Citation Index, SSCI) during the period 1994-2016 as data, we address the question of change and stability in the sciences at the level of the (n2) aggregated citation links between (n) journals. Information theory enables us to study longitudinal developments first at the level of cells and then to aggregate, since the Shannon-formulae are based on using Σs. Micro-developments in the data can thus be related to theorizing about the sciences in terms of distributed change (Price, 1976; cf. Kuhn, 1962). Our results suggest that the dynamics can be explained by considering Bak et al.’s (1987) model of “self-organized criticality”: the knowledge base can be considered as a pile of meta-stable constructs which are continuously disturbed by new knowledge claims bringing also new citation relations. “Avalanches” of variable size can then be expected. The effects, however, are local; the meta-stable regions operate in parallel. The overall system remains tending towards meta-stability—at “the edge of chaos” —because of the ongoing fluxes of new manuscripts creating and rewriting relations in terms of citations at different scales (Zitt et al., 2005). Show less
