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Search Regimes and the Industrial Dynamics of Science

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Abstract

The article addresses the issue of dynamics of science, in particular of new sciences born in twentieth century and developed after the Second World War (information science, materials science, life science). The article develops the notion of search regime as an abstract characterization of dynamic patterns, based on three dimensions: the rate of growth, the degree of internal diversity of science and the associated dynamics (convergent vs. proliferating), and the nature of complementarity. The article offers a conceptual discussion for the argument that new sciences follow a different pattern than established sciences and presents preliminary evidence drawn from original data in particle physics, computer science and nanoscience.

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Notes

  1. “This division of the scientific perspective into laws and outcomes helps us to appreciate why some of the disciplines of science are so different in outlook. Ask the elementary particle physicist what the world is like and they may well tell you that it is very simple—if only you look at it in the ‘right’ way. Everything is governed by a small number of fundamental forces. But ask the same question of biologists or condensed-state physicists, they will tell you that the world is very complicated, asymmetrical and haphazard. The particle physicist studies the fundamental forces with their symmetry and simplicity; by contrast, the biologist is looking at the complicated world of the asymmetrical outcomes of the laws of Nature, where broken symmetries and intricate combinations of simple ingredients are the rule” (Barrow 1998, p. 66).

  2. His discussion is illuminating: “ …as we move through the list we are moving in the direction of the study of regularities of increasingly specific subsystems of the universe. Specific subsystems can exhibit more regularities that are implied generally by the laws of dynamics and the initial condition. The explanation of these regularities lies in the origin and evolution of the specific subsystems in question. Naturally, these regularities are more sensitive to this specific history than they are to the form of the initial condition and dynamics. This is especially clear in a science like biology. Of course, living systems conform to the laws of physics and chemistry, but their detailed form and behaviour depend much more on the frozen accidents of several billion years of evolutionary history on a particular planet moving around a particular star than they do on the details of superstring theory or the ‘no-boundary’ initial condition of the universe” (Hartle 1996, pp. 133, 134).

  3. As Maddox popularizes this point in high energy physics: “At present, these four forces of Nature (electromagnetism, gravity, weak and strong) are the only ones known. Remarkably, we need only these four basic forces to explain every physical interaction and structure that we can see or create in the Universe. Physicists believe that these forces are not as distinct as many of their familiar manifestations would seduce us to believe. Rather, they will be found to manifest different aspects of a single force of Nature. At first, this possibility seems unlikely because the four forces have very different strengths. But in the 1970s, it was discovered that the effective strengths of these forces can change with the temperature of the ambient environment in which they act” (Maddox 1998, p. 126). See also the notion of Holy Graal of unification in physics (Weinberg 1992; ‘t Hooft 1997; Klein and Lachièze-Rey 1999; Randall 2004; Penrose 2005).

  4. Some of these arguments are the result of intense discussions with scientists in a variety of fields: Laura Redivo and Lorenzo Zanella (Glaxo Smith Kline) for HIV, Antonio Cattaneo (SISSA and Lay Line Genomics) for Alzheimer, Claude Mawas (INSERM, Marseille) for cancer, Giovanni Punzi (INFN) for high energy physics, Bruno Codenotti (IIT-CNR) and Gianfranco Bilardi (University of Padua) for computer science, Paolo Dario (SSSUP) for bioengineering, Fabio Beltram (NEST) for nanotechnology and materials. I apologize to all of them for any misunderstanding. Discussions and joint work with Fabio Pammolli (University of Florence and IMT) have taken place for a long time.

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  1. School of Engineering, University of Pisa, Via Diotisalvi 2, 56125, Pisa, Italy

    Andrea Bonaccorsi

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Appendix 1

Appendix 1

Computer Science

In the community of computer scientists, the website managed by NEC Corporation (http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/mostcited.html) is considered as a reliable source. It is based on the automatic updating of information from a large list of journals in computer science that add to the total count of citations that each author receives.

We built up a database with personal information of top 1,000 scientists in the CiteSeer ranking. Curriculum vitae of all top scientists were manually downloaded and classified, given the lack of automatic software tools for the structuration of informal information such as CVs.

An extensive cross-validation of information was carried out. Together with CVs we built up from CVs the list of publications of computer scientists and downloaded them whenever possible. We manually inspected words and affiliations from full downloaded papers, cover pages, or titles. We only considered articles published in international journals, following the same broad definition of standard ISI data. Clearly the set of journals is larger than the one considered in the relevant section of ISI data, giving a more accurate picture of scientific activity in the computer science community.

High Energy Physics

The community of high energy physics manages its own website, where scientists upload all their publications.

The website at http://www.santafe.edu/~mark/collaboration/ provides the list of top most productive scientists. Again, we downloaded the full list of publications of these authors. We manually inspected words and affiliations from these papers, following the same methodology as above.

Nanotechnology

We used the full keyword structure developed by Fraunhofer ISI Karlsruhe for nanotech (courtesy of Ulrich Schmoch). With this query, we built up the full list of publications in nanotechnology, from ISI, comprising more than 100,000 papers in the period 1990–2001, under a PRIME project on Nanodistricts, for which the use of ISI data was authorized. Data on publications have been manually matched with data on inventors, drawn from patent data at USPTO and EPO, and the combinations of authorships and inventorships have been derived. Details can be found in Bonaccorsi and Thoma (2007) and Bonaccorsi and Vargas (2007).

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Bonaccorsi, A. Search Regimes and the Industrial Dynamics of Science. Minerva 46, 285–315 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11024-008-9101-3

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