BACKGROUND The increasing availability of digital data on scholarly inputs and outputs—
from research funding, productivity, and collaboration to paper citations and scientist mobility …

The identification of emerging topics is of current interest to decision makers in both
government and industry. Although many case studies present retrospective analyses of …

There is considerable and growing interest in the emergence of novel technologies,
especially from the policy-making perspective. Yet, as an area of study, emerging …

This book presents a new way of thinking about the history of science and technology, one
that offers a grand narrative of human history in which knowledge serves as a critical factor …

One of the fundamental problems in science is the understanding of discovery and
innovation process to explain scientific and technological change in society. The study …

The concepts of sustainable development have experienced extraordinary success since
their advent in the 1980s. They are now an integral part of the agenda of governments and …

How do scientific disciplines evolve? This is one of the fundamental problems of the
dynamics of science. This study confronts this problem here by investigating the evolution of …

We propose an explanatory and computational theory of transformative discoveries in
science. The theory is derived from a recurring theme found in a diverse range of scientific …

Ontologies of research areas are important tools for characterising, exploring, and analysing
the research landscape. Some fields of research are comprehensively described by large …

The birth and decline of disciplines are critical to science and society. How do scientific
disciplines emerge? No quantitative model to date allows us to validate competing theories …