Title: Knowledge Evolution in Physics Research: An Analysis of Bibliographic Coupling Networks,
Abstract: Even as we advance the frontiers of physics knowledge, our understanding of
how this knowledge evolves remains at the descriptive levels of Popper and
Kuhn. Using the APS publications data sets, we ask in this letter how new
knowledge is built upon old knowledge. We do so by constructing year-to-year
bibliographic coupling networks, and identify in them validated communities
that represent different research fields. We then visualize their evolutionary
relationships in the form of alluvial diagrams, and show how they remain intact
through APS journal splits. Quantitatively, we see that most fields undergo
weak Popperian mixing, and it is rare for a field to remain isolated/undergo
strong mixing. The sizes of fields obey a simple linear growth with
recombination. We can also reliably predict the merging between two fields, but
not for the considerably more complex splitting. Finally, we report a case
study of two fields that underwent repeated merging and splitting around 1995,
and how these Kuhnian events are correlated with breakthroughs on BEC, quantum
teleportation, and slow light. This impact showed up quantitatively in the
citations of the BEC field as a larger proportion of references from during and
shortly after these events.