Achievement

As one of the IPEM-required trainee group projects, a group led by Douglas Barron used the "meme" concept to reconstruct the citation network for various ideas within evolutionary biology, and created models of how those ideas spread within their natal discipline, and how they leap to other disciplines. They noted that the advent of online databases such as ISI Web of Science and Google Scholar have changed the landscape of scientific scholarship, simultaneously allowing ideas to spread very rapidly within and between disciplines, but also increasing the impact of preferential attachment to a very small number of influential articles. They argue that this actually retards progress within the sciences, and they are continuing to hone their techniques so that they can offer policy recommendations to professional organizations, and to the corporations that manage these online search tools themselves.