Analysis On The Spatial-temporal Patterns Of The Output Of Academic Magnum Opuses

Quantitative understanding of the process of knowledge creation is crucial for accelerating the advance of science.In recent years,a large amount of research has been conducted on contemporary paper-based scientific activities by studying the publication data of scientific journals,leading to a variety of interesting discoveries at both individual level and disciplinary level.However,before scientific journals appeared on a large scale and became the mainstream for publishing research results,there are also intellectual achievements that have changed the world,which have usually become classic and are now referred to as the academic magnum opuses.So far,little is known about the general law of their birth.By referring to Wikipedia and academic history books,this paper collects 2001 academic magnum opuses,covering mathematics,physics,chemistry,life science,philosophy,economics,politics,sociology,and psychology,and records the bibliographic metadata of these publications such as the year of publication and the place of publication,to form a new academic magnum opuses dataset.Using these bibliographic metadata,this paper first finds that the birth of academic magnum opuses is highly concentrated geographically.This paper further observes the changes in the degree of concentration over time through the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index and Spatial Separation in economic geography and finds that the degree of concentration is gradually weakening,revealing the process of knowledge spillover in the early period of the United Kingdom and the rapid rise of the United States in the late period.In addition,the output of academic magnum opuses is more concentrated than other human activities such as contemporary knowledge production.In order to further study the spatial-temporal characteristics of the output of academic magnum opuses,this paper constructs a spatialtemporal bipartite network and uses the method of complex economics to generate a network that reflects the similarity of output structure between different historical periods,finding that the output structure of various disciplines has a long-range correlation.The positions of historical periods in which different cities have output advantages in the network can reflect the path of academic development,and the dominant academic centers of each discipline are constantly shifting with the development of history.Furthermore,this paper finds the existence of a unified pattern of similarity networks across disciplines,manifested as a common Great Transformation in different disciplines around the 1870s,which may be related to the rise of the United States in academia.Finally,considering that measuring the impact of cities and decades solely based on output may be biased,this paper designs an iterative algorithm on the spatial-temporal bipartite network to measure the leadership of cities and the prosperity of historical periods to re-rank cities and historical periods.In terms of cities,the differences in the city leadership rankings and output rankings reflect that social constructions in different cities form different ways of organizing academic activities.In terms of historical periods,the algorithm successfully reveals the real most prosperous period of each discipline,which can also correspond to the relevant narratives of academic history.Taken together,the findings of this paper quantitatively support some ideas in the history of science and sociology of science and extend them to the humanities and social sciences.The output of academic magnum opuses shows the characteristics of geographical concentration,center shift,the existence of Great Transformation,and differences in cities’ leadership and cities’ output rankings.These characteristics are considered to be related to social context.Therefore,social factors play a non-negligible role in when and where academic magnum opuses arise.