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The speed of information propagation in the scientific network distorts biomedical research
Delays in the propagation of scientific discoveries across scientific communities have been an oft-maligned feature of scientific research for introducing a bias towards knowledge that is produced within a scientist’s closest community. The vastness of the scientific literature has been commonly bla...
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
PeerJ Inc.
2022
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8759377/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35070506 http://dx.doi.org/10.7717/peerj.12764 |
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author | Rodriguez-Esteban, Raul |
author_facet | Rodriguez-Esteban, Raul |
author_sort | Rodriguez-Esteban, Raul |
collection | PubMed |
description | Delays in the propagation of scientific discoveries across scientific communities have been an oft-maligned feature of scientific research for introducing a bias towards knowledge that is produced within a scientist’s closest community. The vastness of the scientific literature has been commonly blamed for this phenomenon, despite recent improvements in information retrieval and text mining. Its actual negative impact on scientific progress, however, has never been quantified. This analysis attempts to do so by exploring its effects on biomedical discovery, particularly in the discovery of relations between diseases, genes and chemical compounds. Results indicate that the probability that two scientific facts will enable the discovery of a new fact depends on how far apart these two facts were originally within the scientific landscape. In particular, the probability decreases exponentially with the citation distance. Thus, the direction of scientific progress is distorted based on the location in which each scientific fact is published, representing a path-dependent bias in which originally closely-located discoveries drive the sequence of future discoveries. To counter this bias, scientists should open the scope of their scientific work with modern information retrieval and extraction approaches. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-8759377 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2022 |
publisher | PeerJ Inc. |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-87593772022-01-21 The speed of information propagation in the scientific network distorts biomedical research Rodriguez-Esteban, Raul PeerJ Computational Biology Delays in the propagation of scientific discoveries across scientific communities have been an oft-maligned feature of scientific research for introducing a bias towards knowledge that is produced within a scientist’s closest community. The vastness of the scientific literature has been commonly blamed for this phenomenon, despite recent improvements in information retrieval and text mining. Its actual negative impact on scientific progress, however, has never been quantified. This analysis attempts to do so by exploring its effects on biomedical discovery, particularly in the discovery of relations between diseases, genes and chemical compounds. Results indicate that the probability that two scientific facts will enable the discovery of a new fact depends on how far apart these two facts were originally within the scientific landscape. In particular, the probability decreases exponentially with the citation distance. Thus, the direction of scientific progress is distorted based on the location in which each scientific fact is published, representing a path-dependent bias in which originally closely-located discoveries drive the sequence of future discoveries. To counter this bias, scientists should open the scope of their scientific work with modern information retrieval and extraction approaches. PeerJ Inc. 2022-01-10 /pmc/articles/PMC8759377/ /pubmed/35070506 http://dx.doi.org/10.7717/peerj.12764 Text en ©2022 Rodriguez-Esteban https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited. |
spellingShingle | Computational Biology Rodriguez-Esteban, Raul The speed of information propagation in the scientific network distorts biomedical research |
title | The speed of information propagation in the scientific network distorts biomedical research |
title_full | The speed of information propagation in the scientific network distorts biomedical research |
title_fullStr | The speed of information propagation in the scientific network distorts biomedical research |
title_full_unstemmed | The speed of information propagation in the scientific network distorts biomedical research |
title_short | The speed of information propagation in the scientific network distorts biomedical research |
title_sort | speed of information propagation in the scientific network distorts biomedical research |
topic | Computational Biology |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8759377/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35070506 http://dx.doi.org/10.7717/peerj.12764 |
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