Proliferation dynamics in new sciences

Abstract

The paper studies the dynamics of production of knowledge in an emergent scientific field, Nanoscience. It suggests that scientific knowledge advances by proliferation, or the turbulent entry of new sub-fields, each generating opportunities for further entries at each time. It suggests a new methodology to define and measure the dynamics of knowledge, based on the industrial dynamics of keywords and a formal representation through bipartite graphs. An empirical examination of the graph dynamics in the early stage of the scientific field (1988–2002) confirms the notion of proliferation.