Epistemic integration and social segregation of AI in neuroscience

TL;DR

This paper empirically analyzes how AI has integrated into neuroscience, forming a distinct community and publication ecosystem that maintains disciplinary boundaries rather than transforming them.

Contribution

It provides a scientometric analysis revealing AI's role in creating a specialized, socially confined subfield within neuroscience, highlighting its diffusion pattern and community structure.

Findings

AI forms a distinct disciplinary ecosystem in neuroscience.

The AI community in neuroscience is socially confined and publishes mainly in dedicated journals.

AI diffusion maintains disciplinary boundaries rather than causing fundamental changes.

Abstract

In recent years, Artificial Intelligence (AI) shows a spectacular ability of insertion inside a variety of disciplines which use it for scientific advancements and which sometimes improve it for their conceptual and methodological needs. According to the transverse science framework originally conceived by Shinn and Joerges, AI can be seen as an instrument which is progressively acquiring a universal character through its diffusion across science. In this paper we address empirically one aspect of this diffusion, namely the penetration of AI into a specific field of research. Taking neuroscience as a case study, we conduct a scientometric analysis of the development of AI in this field. We especially study the temporal egocentric citation network around the articles included in this literature, their represented journals and their authors linked together by a temporal collaboration network. We find that AI is driving the constitution of a particular disciplinary ecosystem in neuroscience which is distinct from other subfields, and which is gathering atypical scientific profiles who are coming from neuroscience or outside it. Moreover we observe that this AI community in neuroscience is socially confined in a specific subspace of the neuroscience collaboration network, which also publishes in a small set of dedicated journals that are mostly active in AI research. According to these results, the diffusion of AI in a discipline such as neuroscience didn't really challenge its disciplinary orientations but rather induced the constitution of a dedicated socio-cognitive environment inside this field.