Forking Paths Of Cultural Complexity: A Case Study Of Research Paradigms

Evolutionary studies of cultural complexity often assume that group members select the best information available in the group, effectively diffusing the best innovations, whose advantages are subsequently passed on to the next generation. This would seem to describe the ideal of the scientific process — each cohort of papers in a field surfacing the best innovations, refining them and passing on to the next “layer†or cohort of scientific works. Here, we use academic journal databases to explore this “forking†(branching) process in the evolution of a scientific paradigm. We apply citation network visualization and Latent Dirichlet allocation topic analysis to three different paradigms defined pragmatically as the set of papers citing a highly influential paper in each respective case. Our three case studies indicate a founder effect in how the seminal paper is highly-embedded in the citation network, and yet peripheral to the evolution of topics in subsequent “layers†of publications within the paradigm. This and additional evidence suggest certain topics are selected and followed, while others are left behind. From these case studies, we discuss how hitherto undeveloped ideas of the past might be located in the topic space of seminal works of the same fruitful time period.