Department of Engineering, University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan.
Amsterdam School of Historical Studies, Universiteit van Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
Sci Rep. 2023 Mar 23;13(1):4759. doi: 10.1038/s41598-023-31452-8.
A scientist's choice of research topic affects the impact of their work and future career. While the disparity between nations in scientific information, funding, and facilities has decreased, scientists on the cutting edge of their fields are not evenly distributed across nations. Here, we quantify relative progress in research topics of a nation from the time-series comparison of reference lists from papers, using 71 million published papers from Scopus. We discover a steady leading-following relationship in research topics between Western nations or Asian city-states and others. Furthermore, we find that a nation's share of information-rich scientists in co-authorship networks correlates highly with that nation's progress in research topics. These results indicate that scientists' relationships continue to dominate scientific evolution in the age of open access to information and explain the failure or success of nations' investments in science.
科学家选择的研究课题会影响其工作和未来职业的影响力。虽然各国之间在科学信息、资金和设施方面的差距已经缩小，但处于各自领域前沿的科学家在各国的分布并不均衡。在这里，我们使用 Scopus 上的 7100 万篇已发表论文，通过对论文参考文献列表的时间序列比较，对一个国家的研究课题的相对进展进行了量化。我们发现，在研究课题上，西方国家或亚洲城邦与其他国家之间存在着稳定的领先-跟随关系。此外，我们还发现，一个国家合著网络中信息丰富的科学家的比例与该国家在研究课题上的进展高度相关。这些结果表明，在信息开放获取的时代，科学家的关系仍然主导着科学的发展，并解释了各国在科学投资方面的成败。
