Communities, knowledge creation, and information diffusion

In this paper, we examine how patterns of scientific collaboration contribute to knowledge creation and diffusion. Recent studies have shown that scientists can benefit from their position within collaborative networks by being able to receive more information of better quality in a timely fashion, and by presiding over communication between collaborators. Here we focus on the tendency of scientists to cluster into tightly knit communities, and discuss the implications of this tendency for scientific production. We begin by reviewing a new method for finding communities, and we then assess its benefits in terms of computation time and accuracy. While communities often serve as a taxonomic scheme to map knowledge domains, they also affect the way scientists engage in the creation of new knowledge. By drawing on the longstanding debate on the relative benefits of social cohesion and brokerage, we discuss the conditions that facilitate collaborations among scientists within or across communities. We show that highly cited scientific production occurs within communities, when scientists have cohesive collaborations with others from the same knowledge domain, and across communities, when scientists intermediate among otherwise disconnected collaborators from different knowledge domains. We also discuss the implications of communities for information diffusion, and show how traditional epidemiological approaches need to be refined to take knowledge heterogeneity into account and preserve the system’s ability to promote creative processes of novel recombinations of ideas.