Abstract
Scientists may shift research interests and span multiple research areas in their careers, reflecting the research diversification of scientists. Quantifying the scientists’ research diversity can help to understand the research patterns of scientists. In this paper, we study the research diversification of scientists in Physics based on the Physics and Astronomy Classification Scheme (PACS) which can well reflect the research topics of physics papers. For each scientist, we first build a PACS codes co-occurrence network and reveal the research diversity by analyzing the connectivity and community structure of this network. Then we use diversity indicators to measure the research diversification of scientists and analyze the distribution of each indicator. Finally, we investigate the relationship between scientists’ diversity indicators and their scientific impact using multiple regression analysis. The results show that the numbers of connected components of most PACS codes co-occurrence networks are less than 5, and some networks have significant community structures. The diversity indicators show the heterogeneity of the research diversity of physicists. We also find that some diversity indicators are weakly correlated with scientific impact indicators. Based on our findings, we suggest that physicists should focus on their main research fields and span multiple research fields over their entire careers which could promote their scientific impact.
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Acknowledgments
This work has been supported by the MOE (Ministry of Education in China) Liberal Arts and Social Sciences Foundation under Grant No. 20YJC870015, the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities under Grant No. 2652019010, and the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant No. 61573065. The authors sincerely thank the referees for their help to improve the quality of this paper.
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Jianlin Zhou is currently a postdoc with the School of Economics and Management, China University of Geosciences (Beijing). He received the Ph.D. degree from Beijing Normal University, in 2019. His research interests include complexity science, complex network, science of science, and social science computing.
Ying Fan is a professor of the School of Systems Science, Beijing Normal University, China. She received her Ph.D. degree in systems science from Beijing Normal University. She is the Deputy Secretary-General and the Executive Director of the China Systems Engineering Society. Her research interests include the self-organization theory, nonlinear dynamics and complex networks.
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Zhou, J., Fan, Y. Quantifying the Research Diversification of Physicists. J. Syst. Sci. Syst. Eng. 30, 712–727 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11518-021-5509-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11518-021-5509-1