Progress in Alzheimer's disease research circa 2013: Is the glass half empty or half full?

Dynamics of social network structure for Alzheimer and Lymphoma scientific communities

Abstract

It is generally assumed that sociology affects scientific progress but specific examples of this assumption are hard to find. We examined this hypothesis by comparing the social network structure and its dynamics over the last 16 years, for two common human diseases; Alzheimer’s disease, for which there has been very little therapeutic progress, and Lymphoma, were there has been significant therapeutic progress. We found that the Alzheimer’s research community is more interlinked (‘dense’) and more ‘cliquish’ than that of Lymphoma and suggest that this could affect its scientific progress.

Reviewers

This article was reviewed by Vladimir Kuznetsov and Anthony Almudevar