Kang Donghyun, Danziger Robert S, Rehman Jalees, Evans James A
Department of Sociology, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA.
Knowledge Lab, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA.
Nat Hum Behav. 2025 Feb;9(2):268-276. doi: 10.1038/s41562-024-02041-0. Epub 2024 Dec 2.
Market bubbles emerge when asset prices are driven unsustainably higher than asset values, and shifts in belief burst them. We demonstrate an analogous phenomenon in the case of biomedical knowledge, when promising research receives inflated attention. We introduce a diffusion index that quantifies whether research areas have been amplified within social and scientific bubbles, or have diffused and become evaluated more broadly. We illustrate the utility of our diffusion approach in tracking the trajectories of cardiac stem cell research (a bubble that collapsed) and cancer immunotherapy (which showed sustained growth). We then trace the diffusion of 28,504 subfields in biomedicine comprising nearly 1.9 M papers and more than 80 M citations to demonstrate that limited diffusion of biomedical knowledge anticipates abrupt decreases in popularity. Our analysis emphasizes that restricted diffusion, implying a socio-epistemic bubble, leads to dramatic collapses in relevance and attention accorded to scientific knowledge.
当资产价格被不可持续地推高至高于资产价值时，市场泡沫就会出现，而信念的转变会使其破裂。我们在生物医学知识领域展示了一种类似的现象，即有前景的研究受到过度关注。我们引入了一个扩散指数，用于量化研究领域是在社会和科学泡沫中被放大，还是已经扩散并得到更广泛的评估。我们举例说明了我们的扩散方法在追踪心脏干细胞研究（一个已破灭的泡沫）和癌症免疫疗法（显示出持续增长）轨迹方面的效用。然后，我们追踪了生物医学中28504个子领域的扩散情况，这些子领域包含近190万篇论文和超过8000万次引用，以证明生物医学知识的有限扩散预示着其受欢迎程度的突然下降。我们的分析强调，有限的扩散意味着社会认知泡沫，会导致科学知识的相关性和关注度急剧下降。
