The Dynamics of Exchanges and References among Scientific Texts, and the Autopoiesis of Discursive Knowledge

TL;DR

This paper models the evolution of scientific communication networks, highlighting how publications influence and reshape discursive knowledge through reflexive, bottom-up, and top-down processes, enabling measurable analysis of scientific development.

Contribution

It introduces a novel model of scientific communication dynamics that captures the reflexive and evolutionary nature of discursive knowledge formation.

Findings

Networks are reconstructed from hindsight perspective.

Different axes differentiate scientific specialties.

The model enables measurement of scientific evolution.

Abstract

Discursive knowledge emerges as codification in flows of communication. The flows of communication are constrained and enabled by networks of communications as their historical manifestations at each moment of time. New publications modify the existing networks by changing the distributions of attributes and relations in document sets, while the networks are self-referentially updated along trajectories. Codification operates reflexively: the network structures are reconstructed from the perspective of hindsight. Codification along different axes differentiates discursive knowledge into specialties. These intellectual control structures are constructed bottom-up, but feed top-down back upon the production of new knowledge. However, the forward dynamics of diffusion in the development of the communication networks along trajectories differs from the feedback mechanisms of control. Analysis of the development of scientific communication in terms of evolving scientific literatures provides us with a model which makes these evolutionary processes amenable to measurement.