Can We `Feel' the Temperature of Knowledge? Modelling Scientific Popularity Dynamics via Thermodynamics

TL;DR

This paper introduces a thermodynamics-inspired model to quantify scientific topic popularity and impact through 'knowledge temperature,' capturing both long-term influence and short-term popularity shifts using citation network dynamics.

Contribution

It proposes a novel thermodynamic framework for modeling scientific topic evolution, integrating impact and structural changes via knowledge temperature derived from citation networks.

Findings

Knowledge temperature correlates with topic impact and popularity.

Temperature surges occur with influential articles or structural shifts.

Topics' evolution follows distinct thermodynamic cycles.

Abstract

Just like everything in the nature, scientific topics flourish and perish. While existing literature well captures article's life-cycle via citation patterns, little is known about how scientific popularity and impact evolves for a specific topic. It would be most intuitive if we could `feel' topic's activity just as we perceive the weather by temperature. Here, we conceive knowledge temperature to quantify topic overall popularity and impact through citation network dynamics. Knowledge temperature includes 2 parts. One part depicts lasting impact by assessing knowledge accumulation with an analogy between topic evolution and isobaric expansion. The other part gauges temporal changes in knowledge structure, an embodiment of short-term popularity, through the rate of entropy change with internal energy, 2 thermodynamic variables approximated via node degree and edge number. Our analysis of representative topics with size ranging from 1000 to over 30000 articles reveals that the key to flourishing is topics' ability in accumulating useful information for future knowledge generation. Topics particularly experience temperature surges when their knowledge structure is altered by influential articles. The spike is especially obvious when there appears a single non-trivial novel research focus or merging in topic structure. Overall, knowledge temperature manifests topics' distinct evolutionary cycles.