arXiv subjects

Kara Kedrick

Publications and source records attributed to Kara Kedrick.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2025

Opening Knowledge Gaps Drives Scientific Progress

Knowledge production is often viewed as an endogenous process in which discovery arises through the recombination of existing theories, findings, and concepts. Yet given the vast space of potential recombinations, not all are equally valuable, and identifying those that may prove most generative remains challenging. We argue that a crucial form of recombination occurs when linking concepts creates knowledge gaps-empty regions in the conceptual landscape that focus scientific attention on proximal, unexplored connections and signal promising directions for future research. Using computational topology, we develop a method to systematically identify knowledge gaps in science at scale. Applying this approach to millions of articles from Microsoft Academic Graph (n = 34,363,623) over a 120-year period (1900-2020), we uncover papers that create topological gaps in concept networks, tracking how these gap-opening works reshape the scientific knowledge landscape. Our results indicate that gap-opening papers are more likely to rank among the most highly cited works (top 1-20%) compared with papers that do not introduce novel concept pairings. In contrast, papers that introduce novel combinations without opening gaps are not more likely to rank in the top 1% for citation counts, and are even less likely than baseline papers to appear in the top 5% to 20%. Our findings also suggest that gap-opening papers are more disruptive, highlighting their generative role in stimulating new directions for scientific inquiry.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2022

Investigating individual writing style as a contributor to gender gaps in science and technology

Gender gaps in how scientific work is evaluated are well documented, but their sources remain debated. We ask whether an overlooked factor---the linguistic style of the writing itself---is gendered and consequential. Drawing on a framework that distinguishes informational features (which emphasize facts) from involved features (which emphasize relationships), we analyze single-authored abstracts of academic papers and patents across all fields of science and technology. Women's writing is systematically more involved than men's---richer in relational, audience-oriented features and higher in the balance of involved to informational language---a difference that holds across scientific fields, in collaborative as well as single-authored work, and in a large open-access biomedical corpus, throughout the full text of papers, not only their abstracts. This stylistic signature also shapes how work is received---papers whose abstracts are more involved are cited more by women and less by men, and the association persists even when papers are compared against their most content-similar alternatives, indicating a gendered signal independent of topic. That a near-costless feature of writing---word choice rather than substance---leaves a systematic, gendered trace on who cites scientific work points to a subtle channel through which evaluation bias may persist, in tension with the universalist ideal that ideas be judged independently of their author.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2022

Conceptual structure and the growth of scientific knowledge

How does scientific knowledge grow? This question has occupied a central place in the philosophy of science, stimulating heated debates, but yielding no clear consensus. Many explanations can be understood in terms of whether and how they view the expansion of knowledge as proceeding through the accretion of scientific concepts into larger conceptual structures. Here, we examine these views empirically, performing a large-scale analysis of the physical and social sciences, spanning five decades. Using natural language processing techniques, we create semantic networks of concepts, wherein noun phrases become linked when used in the same paper abstract. For both the physical and social sciences, we observe increasingly rigid conceptual cores (i.e., densely connected sets of highly central nodes) accompanied by the proliferation of periphery concepts (i.e., sparsely connected nodes that are highly connected to the core). Subsequently, we examine the relationship between conceptual structure and the growth of scientific knowledge, finding that scientific works are more innovative in fields with cores that have higher conceptual churn and with larger cores. Furthermore, scientific consensus is associated with reduced conceptual churn and fewer conceptual cores. Overall, our findings suggest that while the organization of scientific concepts is important for the growth of knowledge, the mechanisms vary across time.

cs.SI↗