School of Systems Science, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, P R China.
Sci Rep. 2013;3:2207. doi: 10.1038/srep02207.
Do scientists follow hot topics in their scientific investigations? In this paper, by performing analysis to papers published in the American Physical Society (APS) Physical Review journals, it is found that papers are more likely to be attracted by hot fields, where the hotness of a field is measured by the number of papers belonging to the field. This indicates that scientists generally do follow hot topics. However, there are qualitative differences among scientists from various countries, among research works regarding different number of authors, different number of affiliations and different number of references. These observations could be valuable for policy makers when deciding research funding and also for individual researchers when searching for scientific projects.
科学家在科学研究中是否会追随热门话题？在本文中，通过对美国物理学会（APS）物理评论期刊上发表的论文进行分析，发现论文更有可能被热门领域所吸引，而一个领域的热度则可以通过该领域的论文数量来衡量。这表明科学家通常确实会追随热门话题。然而，来自不同国家的科学家之间存在着质的差异，具体表现在研究工作的作者数量、机构数量和参考文献数量等方面。这些观察结果对于决策者在决定研究资金时以及对于个体研究人员在寻找科学项目时可能具有重要价值。
