A crowded frontier 
By James A. Evans

Science is a complex system in which rapid circulation of advances has resulted in scientists crowding the same frontier of accumulated knowledge, constrained to imagine the same combinations of ideas and methods that they might use to unlock discoveries, rather than exploring more broadly. 

Applying computational tools to massive corpora of digitized scientific texts and databases of experimental results, recent research has advanced our ability to trace the dynamic frontier of collective attention and explore how we might accelerate discovery, identifying possibilities missed by the crowd and potentially uninferrable by any particular scientist. 

For example, nearly all combinations of scientific components in a given year's papers, most of them highly redundant, can be predicted by random walks across the network traced by papers published in the prior year 

Algorithms can identify hypotheses unimagined and paths untaken, not necessarily because they lack scientific promise but because scientists are channeled away by shared institutional realities, such as the incentive to build on work familiar to one's audience (and reviewers)  

These findings highlight the importance of supporting diverse approaches and independence in research, and of building institutions that log failures as well as successes in order to accelerate collective advancement.

http://science.sciencemag.org

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