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Quantifying simultaneous innovations in evolutionary medicine
Deryc T Painter1, Frank van der Wouden2, Manfred D Laubichler3,4
1School of Complex Adaptive System, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, 85281, USA.
Theory in Biosciences = Theorie in Den Biowissenschaften
|November 26, 2020
Summary
Simultaneous innovations in evolutionary medicine often occur independently. This suggests new ideas emerge from a shared knowledge pool, not just local collaborations, highlighting collective behavior in scientific discovery.
Area of Science:
- Evolutionary Medicine
- Scientific Discovery
- Innovation Studies
Background:
- Understanding the origins of simultaneous innovations is crucial for comprehending scientific progress.
- Previous research has not systematically investigated the independence of simultaneous innovations in specific scientific fields.
Purpose of the Study:
- To systematically identify simultaneous innovations in evolutionary medicine.
- To determine the extent to which these simultaneous innovations are independent of each other.
- To analyze the geographical distribution of co-authorship networks for simultaneous innovative papers.
Main Methods:
- Utilized a novel persistent keyword framework to identify innovations in a corpus of evolutionary medicine papers (2007-2011).
- Examined citation and co-authorship metadata to assess the independence of simultaneous innovative papers.
- Compared the geographical concentration of co-authors for simultaneous innovative papers versus non-innovative papers.
Main Results:
- Identified 22 instances of simultaneous innovative papers within the analyzed corpus.
- Found that 19 out of 22 simultaneous innovative papers occurred independently.
- Co-authors of simultaneous innovative papers showed no greater geographical concentration than co-authors of non-innovative papers.
Conclusions:
- Simultaneous innovations in evolutionary medicine largely arise independently.
- The findings support the theory that innovative work draws from a collective, dispersed knowledge pool.
- New scientific ideas can emerge concurrently across multiple locations with geographically distributed collaboration networks, indicating collective behavior drives innovation.
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