Increasing trend of scientists to switch between topics

Abstract

We analyze the publication records of individual scientists, aiming to quantify the topic switching dynamics of scientists and its influence. For each scientist, the relations among her publications are characterized via shared references. We find that the co-citing network of the papers of a scientist exhibits a clear community structure where each major community represents a research topic. Our analysis suggests that scientists tend to have a narrow distribution of the number of topics. However, researchers nowadays switch more frequently between topics than those in the early days. We also find that high switching probability in early career (<12y) is associated with low overall productivity, while it is correlated with high overall productivity in latter career. Interestingly, the average citation per paper, however, is in all career stages negatively correlated with the switching probability. We propose a model with exploitation and exploration mechanisms that can explain the main observed features.