On disciplinary fragmentation and scientific progress

Establishing a Health CASCADE-Curated Open-Access Database to Consolidate Knowledge About Co-Creation: Novel Artificial Intelligence-Assisted Methodology Based on Systematic Reviews

BACKGROUND

Co-creation is an approach that aims to democratize research and bridge the gap between research and practice, but the potential fragmentation of knowledge about co-creation has hindered progress. A comprehensive database of published literature from multidisciplinary sources can address this fragmentation through the integration of diverse perspectives, identification and dissemination of best practices, and increase clarity about co-creation. However, two considerable challenges exist. First, there is uncertainty about co-creation terminology, making it difficult to identify relevant literature. Second, the exponential growth of scientific publications has led to an overwhelming amount of literature that surpasses the human capacity for a comprehensive review. These challenges hinder progress in co-creation research and underscore the need for a novel methodology to consolidate and investigate the literature.

OBJECTIVE

This study aimed to synthesize knowledge about co-creation across various fields through the development and application of an artificial intelligence (AI)-assisted selection process. The ultimate goal of this database was to provide stakeholders interested in co-creation with relevant literature.

METHODS

We created a novel methodology for establishing a curated database. To accommodate the variation in terminology, we used a broad definition of co-creation that encompassed the essence of existing definitions. To filter out irrelevant information, an AI-assisted selection process was used. In addition, we conducted bibliometric analyses and quality control procedures to assess content and accuracy. Overall, this approach allowed us to develop a robust and reliable database that serves as a valuable resource for stakeholders interested in co-creation.

RESULTS

The final version of the database included 13,501 papers, which are indexed in Zenodo and accessible in an open-access downloadable format. The quality assessment revealed that 20.3% (140/688) of the database likely contained irrelevant material, whereas the methodology captured 91% (58/64) of the relevant literature. Participatory and variations of the term co-creation were the most frequent terms in the title and abstracts of included literature. The predominant source journals included health sciences, sustainability, environmental sciences, medical research, and health services research.

CONCLUSIONS

This study produced a high-quality, open-access database about co-creation. The study demonstrates that it is possible to perform a systematic review selection process on a fragmented concept using human-AI collaboration. Our unified concept of co-creation includes the co-approaches (co-creation, co-design, and co-production), forms of participatory research, and user involvement. Our analysis of authorship, citations, and source landscape highlights the potential lack of collaboration among co-creation researchers and underscores the need for future investigation into the different research methodologies. The database provides a resource for relevant literature and can support rapid literature reviews about co-creation. It also offers clarity about the current co-creation landscape and helps to address barriers that researchers may face when seeking evidence about co-creation.

Towards a systematization of brain oscillatory activity in actions

Information processing in the brain is governed by oscillatory activity. Activity oscillations in specific frequency bands (theta, alpha, beta and gamma) have been associated with various cognitive functions. A drawback of this is that the plethora of findings led to considerable uncertainty as to the functional relevance of activity in different frequency bands and their interrelation. Here, we use a novel cognitive-science theoretical framework to better understand and conceptually harmonize neurophysiological research on human action control. We outline how this validated starting point can systematize and probably reframe the functional relevance of oscillatory activity relevant for action control and beyond.

Numbers of publications and citations for researchers in fields pertinent to the social services: a comparison of peer-reviewed journal publications across six disciplines

Timely dissemination of knowledge is essential and fosters development of knowledge both within academe and the wider society, not least for knowledge that serves practises outside of academia. Here, we compare six disciplines which provide health-related knowledge that serve the health and social services. Most previous research compares the size and impact of the body of publications belonging to each discipline, which ignores the distribution of seniority, productivity, and impact amongst researchers. Instead, we consider the whole population of academics in Sweden employed or active within each discipline, including those who have nil publications. The disciplines form three clusters, where researchers in Public Health and Nursing and Caring science claim about 15 articles per author, Psychology about 10, and Education, Sociology and Social Work less than four. Their numbers of citations follow the same pattern, and are substantially correlated with the number of articles. Tenured or full professors had about 50% more publications and citations per publication than had associate professors. The distributions indicate clear modes at 0, 4, and 16 publications for each cluster, and provide the proportions of researchers within each discipline who have no such publications at all. We discuss the implications of these results for policy, practice, and knowledge quality in the social services and the welfare sector.

The LOTUS initiative for open knowledge management in natural products research

Contemporary bioinformatic and chemoinformatic capabilities hold promise to reshape knowledge management, analysis and interpretation of data in natural products research. Currently, reliance on a disparate set of non-standardized, insular, and specialized databases presents a series of challenges for data access, both within the discipline and for integration and interoperability between related fields. The fundamental elements of exchange are referenced structure-organism pairs that establish relationships between distinct molecular structures and the living organisms from which they were identified. Consolidating and sharing such information via an open platform has strong transformative potential for natural products research and beyond. This is the ultimate goal of the newly established LOTUS initiative, which has now completed the first steps toward the harmonization, curation, validation and open dissemination of 750,000+ referenced structure-organism pairs. LOTUS data is hosted on Wikidata and regularly mirrored on https://lotus.naturalproducts.net. Data sharing within the Wikidata framework broadens data access and interoperability, opening new possibilities for community curation and evolving publication models. Furthermore, embedding LOTUS data into the vast Wikidata knowledge graph will facilitate new biological and chemical insights. The LOTUS initiative represents an important advancement in the design and deployment of a comprehensive and collaborative natural products knowledge base.

Viruses as Living Systems—A Metacybernetic View

The debate over whether viruses are living organisms tends to be paradigmatically determined. The metabolic paradigm denies that they are, while new research evidences the opposite. The purpose of this paper is to deliver a generic model for viral contexts that explains why viruses are alive. It will take a systems biology approach, with a qualitative part (using metacybernetics) to provide deeper explanations of viral contexts, and a quantitative part (using Fisher Information deriving from the variational principle of Extreme Physical Information) which is in principle able to take measurements and predict outcomes. The modelling process provides an extended view of the epigenetic processes of viruses. The generic systems biology model will depict viruses as autonomous entities with metaphysical processes of autopoietic self-organisation and adaptation, enabling them to maintain their physical viability and hence, within their populations, mutate and evolve. The autopoietic epigenetic processes are shown to describe their capability to change, and these are both qualitatively and quantitatively explored, the latter providing an approach to make measurements of physical phenomena under uncertainty. Viruses maintain their fitness when they are able to maintain their stability, and this is indicated by information flow efficacy. A brief case study is presented on the COVID-19 virus from the perspective that it is a living system, and this includes outcome predictions given Fisher Information conditions for known contexts.

Investigating disagreement in the scientific literature

Disagreement is essential to scientific progress but the extent of disagreement in science, its evolution over time, and the fields in which it happens remain poorly understood. Here we report the development of an approach based on cue phrases that can identify instances of disagreement in scientific articles. These instances are sentences in an article that cite other articles. Applying this approach to a collection of more than four million English-language articles published between 2000 and 2015 period, we determine the level of disagreement in five broad fields within the scientific literature (biomedical and health sciences; life and earth sciences; mathematics and computer science; physical sciences and engineering; and social sciences and humanities) and 817 meso-level fields. Overall, the level of disagreement is highest in the social sciences and humanities, and lowest in mathematics and computer science. However, there is considerable heterogeneity across the meso-level fields, revealing the importance of local disciplinary cultures and the epistemic characteristics of disagreement. Analysis at the level of individual articles reveals notable episodes of disagreement in science, and illustrates how methodological artifacts can confound analyses of scientific texts.

Disconnected psychology and neuroscience-implications for scientific progress, replicability and the role of publishing

There has been a fascination for centuries surrounding drivers of human behavior and the relationship between the ‘mind’ and the brain. However, there is an ongoing disconnection between different research communities aiming to provide a mechanistic understanding about what underlies behavior, psychology and neuroscience. This comment outlines why this is a problem for scientific progress and replicability in brain sciences and considers how publishers can play a central role to help overcome the disconnect between, what should be, joint scientific communities.

In this comment, Professor Christian Beste discusses the disconnection between psychology and neuroscience and the effects this can have on the progress of both fields and reproducibility. He also considers the role that publishers can play in strengthening the connections between the disciplines.

Biologically grounded scientific methods: The challenges ahead for combating epidemics

The protracted COVID 19 pandemic may indicate failures of scientific methodologies. Hoping to facilitate the evaluation and/or update of methods relevant in Biomedicine, several aspects of scientific processes are here explored. First, the background is reviewed. In particular, eight topics are analyzed: (i) the history of Higher Education models in reference to the pursuit of science and the type of student cognition pursued, (ii) whether explanatory or actionable knowledge is emphasized depending on the well- or ill-defined nature of problems, (iii) the role of complexity and dynamics, (iv) how differences between Biology and other fields influence methodologies, (v) whether theory, hypotheses or data drive scientific research, (vi) whether Biology is reducible to one or a few factors, (vii) the fact that data, to become actionable knowledge, require structuring, and (viii) the need of inter-/trans-disciplinary knowledge integration. To illustrate how these topics interact, a second section describes four temporal stages of scientific methods: conceptualization, operationalization, validation and evaluation. They refer to the transition from abstract (non-measurable) concepts (such as 'health') to the selection of concrete (measurable) operations (such as 'quantification of ́anti-virus specific antibody titers'). Conceptualization is the process that selects concepts worth investigating, which continues as operationalization when data-producing variables viewed to reflect critical features of the concepts are chosen. Because the operations selected are not necessarily valid, informative, and may fail to solve problems, validations and evaluations are critical stages, which require inter/trans-disciplinary knowledge integration. It is suggested that data structuring can substantially improve scientific methodologies applicable in Biology, provided that other aspects here mentioned are also considered. The creation of independent bodies meant to evaluate biologically oriented scientific methods is recommended.

Dimensions of Musical Creativity

Current literature on creative cognition has developed rich conceptual landscapes dedicated to the analysis of both individual and collective forms of creativity. This work has favored the emergence of unifying theories on domain-general creative abilities in which the main experiential, behavioral, computational, and neural aspects involved in everyday creativity are examined and discussed. But while such accounts have gained important analytical leverage for describing the overall conditions and mechanisms through which creativity emerges and operates, they necessarily leave contextual forms of creativity less explored. Among the latter, musical practices have recently drawn the attention of scholars interested in its creative properties as well as in the creative potential of those who engage with them. In the present article, we compare previously posed theories of creativity in musical and non-musical domains to lay the basis of a conceptual framework that mitigates the tension between (i) individual and collective and (ii) domain-general and domain-specific perspectives on creativity. In doing so, we draw from a range of scholarship in music and enactive cognitive science, and propose that creative cognition may be best understood as a process of skillful organism-environment adaptation that one cultivates endlessly. With its focus on embodiment, plurality, and adaptiveness, our account points to a structured unity between living systems and their world, disclosing a variety of novel analytical resources for research and theory across different dimensions of (musical) creativity.

Psychology: a Giant with Feet of Clay

The aim of the current study has been to highlight the theoretical precariousness of Psychology. The theoretical precariousness has been evidenced through a review of psychological "core-constructs" whose definitions were thoroughly searched in 11 popular introductory textbooks of psychology edited between 2012 and 2019 and in an APA dictionary of Psychology (VandeBos 2015). This analysis has shown unsatisfactory or discordant definitions of psychological "core-constructs". A further epistemological comparison between psychology and three "harder" sciences (i.e., physics, chemistry and biology) seemed to support the "soft" nature of psychology: a minor consensus in its "core" and a minor capacity to accumulate knowledge when compared to the former "harder" sciences (Fanelli in PLoS One, 5, e10068, 2010; Fanelli and Glänzel in PLoS One, 8, e66938, 2013). This comparison also seemed to support the "pre-paradigmatic" condition of psychology, in which conflicts between rival schools of thought hamper the development of a real unified paradigm (Kuhn 1970). To enter a paradigmatic stage, we propose here evolutionary psychology as the most compelling approach, thanks to its empirical support and theoretical consistency. However, since the skepticism about "grand unifying theories" is well disposed (Badcock in Review of General Psychology, 16, 10-23, 2012), we suggest that evolutionary psychology must be intended as a pluralistic approach rather than a monolithic one, and that its main strength is its capacity to resolve the nature-nurture dialectics.

Vocabulary sharing among subjects belonging to the hierarchy of sciences

To what extent do the vocabularies of mathematics, computing, astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology, psychology, sociology, economics, political science, philosophy, and linguistics overlap? To explore this question, samples of the anglophone vocabularies of these subjects were created using the Oxford English Dictionary (Benjafield in Scientometrics 118:1051-1064, 2019. 10.1007/s11192-019-03021-2). The first part of this study compared the vocabularies of the five empirical members of Comte's hierarchy of the sciences (HoS) plus psychology (i.e., astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology, psychology, sociology). The results were generally consistent with the existence of an empirical HoS. For example, each subject shared its vocabulary the most with another subject adjacent to it in the hierarchy (i.e., astronomy with physics, physics with chemistry, biology with chemistry, psychology with biology, sociology with psychology). The second part of this study examined patterns of sharing between mathematics, computing, economics, political science, philosophy, linguistics and the six members of the empirical HoS. Among the most interesting results was the high degree of vocabulary sharing between mathematics, philosophy, and linguistics. Indeed, it turns out that all subjects share their vocabularies with all other subjects, to varying degrees. It was suggested that, in addition to comparing subjects in terms of a linear HoS, similarities between subjects should be examined independently of their position on the HoS.

Context and the evidence-based paradigm: The potential for participatory research and systems thinking in oral health

The implementation of research evidence to promote oral health is critical, given the intransigent and emerging challenges for policymakers at a population level. Despite this, little attention has been paid to implementation research within the evidence-based paradigm. This is important as getting research evidence into clinical practice is not a linear path that consists of simple sequential steps. In this article, we argue that we need to consider a broader range of conceptual and methodological approaches to increase the value of information generated. This should be undertaken either in parallel with empirical and experimental designs, or in some cases, instead of. This is important if we are going to understand the complexity and contextual knowledge of the 'system', within which interventions are implemented. Involving key stakeholders alongside empirical and experimental designs is one helpful approach. Examples of these approaches include Patient and Public Involvement and the development of Core Outcome Sets, where the views of those that will be potentially affected by the research, are included. The use of theoretical frameworks and process evaluations alongside trials are also important, if they are fully integrated into the approach taken to address the research question. A more radical approach is using participatory designs and 'systems thinking'. Participatory approaches include subject matter 'experts by experience'. These include patients, their families, carers, healthcare professionals, services managers, policymakers, commissioners and researchers. Participatory approaches raise important questions about who facilitates the process, when it should happen and how the diverse actors become meaningfully engaged so that their involvement is active, democratic and ongoing. We argue that the issues of control, power and language are central to this and represent a paradigmatic shift to conventional approaches. Systems thinking captures the idea that public health problems commonly involve multiple interdependent and interconnected factors, which interact with each other dynamically. This approach challenges the simplicity of the hierarchy of evidence and linear sequential logic, when it does not account for context. In contrast, systems thinking accepts complexity de novo and emphasizes the need to understand the whole system rather than its individual component parts. We conclude with the idea that participatory and systems thinking help to unpack the diverse agents that are often involved in the generation and translation of evidence into clinical dental practice. It moves our conception of research away from a simple exchange between 'knowledge producers' and 'knowledge users' and raises both methodological and epistemological challenges.

Critical Assessment of Targeted Protein Degradation as a Research Tool and Pharmacological Modality

Small molecules continue to dominate drug discovery because of their ease of use, lower cost of manufacturing, and access to intracellular targets. However, despite these advantages, small molecules are more likely to fail in clinical trials compared with biologicals and their development remains limited to a small subset of disease-relevant 'druggable' targets. Targeted protein degradation has recently emerged as a novel pharmacological modality that promises to overcome small molecule limitations whilst retaining their key advantages. Here, we use a Strengths-Weaknesses-Opportunities-Threats (SWOT) framework to critically assess the current status of this rapidly evolving field. We expect that degrader molecules are only the beginning of a range of novel targeting modalities that hijack existing endogenous cellular machineries to chemically redirect biological targets and pathways. Therefore, this piece may offer a roadmap for enhancing development of both degraders and related modalities.

The evolution of data science and big data research: A bibliometric analysis

In this study the evolution of Big Data (BD) and Data Science (DS) literatures and the relationship between the two are analyzed by bibliometric indicators that help establish the course taken by publications on these research areas before and after forming concepts. We observe a surge in BD publications along a gradual increase in DS publications. Interestingly, a new publications course emerges combining the BD and DS concepts. We evaluate the three literature streams using various bibliometric indicators including research areas and their origin, central journals, the countries producing and funding research and startup organizations, citation dynamics, dispersion and author commitment. We find that BD and DS have differing academic origin and different leading publications. Of the two terms, BD is more salient, possibly catalyzed by the strong acceptance of the pre-coordinated term by the research community, intensive citation activity, and also, we observe, by generous funding from Chinese sources. Overall, DS literature serves as a theory-base for BD publications.

nodeGame: Real-time, synchronous, online experiments in the browser

nodeGame is a free, open-source JavaScript/ HTML5 framework for conducting synchronous experiments online and in the lab directly in the browser window. It is specifically designed to support behavioral research along three dimensions: (i) larger group sizes, (ii) real-time (but also discrete time) experiments, and (iii) batches of simultaneous experiments. nodeGame has a modular source code, and defines an API (application programming interface) through which experimenters can create new strategic environments and configure the platform. With zero-install, nodeGame can run on a great variety of devices, from desktop computers to laptops, smartphones, and tablets. The current version of the software is 3.0, and extensive documentation is available on the wiki pages at http://nodegame.org .

The influence of past research on the design of experiments with dissolved organic matter and engineered nanoparticles

To assess the environmental fate of engineered nanoparticles (ENPs), it is essential to understand their interactions with dissolved organic matter (DOM). The highly complex nature of the interactions between DOM and ENPs and other particulate matter (PM) requires investigating a wide range of material types under different conditions. However, despite repeated calls for an increased diversity of the DOM and PM studied, researchers increasingly focus on certain subsets of DOM and PM. Considering the discrepancy between the calls for more diversity and the research actually carried out, we hypothesize that materials that were studied more often are more visible in the scientific literature and therefore are more likely to be studied again. To investigate the plausibility of this hypothesis, we developed an agent-based model simulating the material choice in the experiments studying the interaction between DOM and PM between 1990 and 2015. The model reproduces the temporal trends in the choice of materials as well as the main properties of a network that displays the DOM and PM types investigated experimentally. The results, which support the hypothesis of a positive reinforcing material choice, help to explain why calls to increase the diversity of the materials studied are repeatedly made and why recent criticism states that the selection of materials is unbalanced.

I Like, I Cite? Do Facebook Likes Predict the Impact of Scientific Work?

Due to the increasing amount of scientific work and the typical delays in publication, promptly assessing the impact of scholarly work is a huge challenge. To meet this challenge, one solution may be to create and discover innovative indicators. The goal of this paper is to investigate whether Facebook likes for unpublished manuscripts that are uploaded to the Internet could be used as an early indicator of the future impact of the scientific work. To address our research question, we compared Facebook likes for manuscripts uploaded to the Harvard Business School website (Study 1) and the bioRxiv website (Study 2) with traditional impact indicators (journal article citations, Impact Factor, Immediacy Index) for those manuscripts that have been published as a journal article. Although based on our full sample of Study 1 (N = 170), Facebook likes do not predict traditional impact indicators, for manuscripts with one or more Facebook likes (n = 95), our results indicate that the more Facebook likes a manuscript receives, the more journal article citations the manuscript receives. In additional analyses (for which we categorized the manuscripts as psychological and non-psychological manuscripts), we found that the significant prediction of citations stems from the psychological and not the non-psychological manuscripts. In Study 2, we observed that Facebook likes (N = 270) and non-zero Facebook likes (n = 84) do not predict traditional impact indicators. Taken together, our findings indicate an interdisciplinary difference in the predictive value of Facebook likes, according to which Facebook likes only predict citations in the psychological area but not in the non-psychological area of business or in the field of life sciences. Our paper contributes to understanding the possibilities and limits of the use of social media indicators as potential early indicators of the impact of scientific work.