Network of scientific concepts: empirical analysis and modeling

Abstract

Concepts in a certain domain of science are linked via intrinsic connections reflecting the structure of knowledge. To get a qualitative insight and a quantitative description of this structure, we perform empirical analysis and modeling of the network of scientific concepts in the domain of physics. To this end we use a collection of manuscripts submitted to the e-print repository arXiv and the vocabulary of scientific concepts collected via the ScienceWISE.info platform and construct a network of scientific concepts based on their co-occurrences in publications. The resulting complex network possesses a number of specific features (high node density, dissortativity, structural correlations, skewed node degree distribution) that can not be understood as a result of simple growth by several commonly used network models. We show that the model based on a simultaneous account of two factors, growth by blocks and preferential selection, gives an explanation of empirically observed properties of the concepts network.