Speaker
Dr
Jevin West
(University of Washington)
Description
As Derek de Solla Price famously noted in 1965, the
scientific literature forms a vast network. The nodes of
this network are the millions of published articles, and
they are linked to one another by citations and footnotes.
This network grows dynamically and organically, doubling in
size every ten to twenty years. It is within this growing
network ecosystem that scholars conduct their research. But
how does one find his or her way around a vast edifice in
which new rooms, corridors, vestibules, and wings are
continually added on an ever-expanding foundation? We
propose that the revolution in digital scholarship provides
the raw material, that when combined with intelligent
algorithms, can resolve this problem. Our general approach
is to infer a hierarchical map of science from citation
data, and then label the structures on this map using an
information-theoretic analysis of the full text of papers we
are studying. We are currently scaling this technique to
the full universe of scholarly publication, so that
researchers may always be navigating with maps that are
current not to years but to days.
