Deep Learning in Science

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the rapid global diffusion of Deep Learning in science, its regional and disciplinary variations, and its impact on scientific novelty and citation performance, highlighting both its current limitations and potential as a general scientific method.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive empirical analysis of DL adoption in science, revealing diffusion patterns and its effects on scientific impact and novelty.

Findings

DL adoption is growing exponentially worldwide.

Regional differences exist in DL application domains.

DL adoption correlates with higher citation impact but lower scientific novelty.

Abstract

Much of the recent success of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been spurred on by impressive achievements within a broader family of machine learning methods, commonly referred to as Deep Learning (DL). This paper provides insights on the diffusion and impact of DL in science. Through a Natural Language Processing (NLP) approach on the arXiv.org publication corpus, we delineate the emerging DL technology and identify a list of relevant search terms. These search terms allow us to retrieve DL-related publications from Web of Science across all sciences. Based on that sample, we document the DL diffusion process in the scientific system. We find i) an exponential growth in the adoption of DL as a research tool across all sciences and all over the world, ii) regional differentiation in DL application domains, and iii) a transition from interdisciplinary DL applications to disciplinary research within application domains. In a second step, we investigate how the adoption of DL methods affects scientific development. Therefore, we empirically assess how DL adoption relates to re-combinatorial novelty and scientific impact in the health sciences. We find that DL adoption is negatively correlated with re-combinatorial novelty, but positively correlated with expectation as well as variance of citation performance. Our findings suggest that DL does not (yet?) work as an autopilot to navigate complex knowledge landscapes and overthrow their structure. However, the 'DL principle' qualifies for its versatility as the nucleus of a general scientific method that advances science in a measurable way.