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community of practice. These changes in social dynamics and cognitive content are mani-
fest in terms of a topological transformation of their large-scale structure of collaboration.
Moreover, we go one step further to show how all fields analyzed here can be interpreted
as undergoing the same kind of idealized phase transition, though certain dynamical and
small-scale structural aspects of each field vary.
The main methodological challenge in comparing different fields from this perspective is
the enormous variation in their size (measured in terms of number of publications and au-
thors), which is manifested also in their network and dynamical properties. By any measure
it is common to find fields with only tens or hundreds of authors, which are characterized by
clear unifying concepts and techniques. However, we often also refer to much larger fields
with hundreds of thousands of authors or more, which show much more diversity and are
much more loosely connected. Are these instances of the same phenomenon? To address
these issues we develop a theoretical framework based on familiar ideas of universality in
critical phenomena observed in finite-size systems. We show that within such a framework,
any field can be thought of as the realization of certain general dynamics of agglomeration
and percolation. Moreover, we demonstrate that in a very specific quantitative sense, all
fields are comparable under scale transformations and map to an idealized dynamical social
network critical phenomenon that can exist at any scale, including the limit of very large
numbers of authors.
2 Results
2.1 Characterizing Growth Over Time
In this study we have examined the growth and development of several scientific and tech-
nical fields as they changed over a time-scale of decades. The fields vary greatly in size
and composition: from relatively modest-sized communities in theoretical physics such as
cosmic strings or cosmological inflation, in which authors have similar training; to benchtop
biomedical topics like research on scrapie and prions, which incorporate co-authors of varied3
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Bettencourt, L. M. A. (LANL) & Kaiser, D. I. (MIT). General Critical Properties of the Dynamics of Scientific Discovery, report, May 31, 2011; United States. (https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc829930/m1/3/: accessed March 19, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, UNT Digital Library, https://digital.library.unt.edu; crediting UNT Libraries Government Documents Department.