Modern scientific research evokes ecological imagery and metaphors given that it is global, interdependent, and diverse. Ecological network structures—like matrices of predators-and-prey or pollinators-and-plants—can be reordered to form nested patterns. These patterns describe the overall health of ecosystems, species as generalists (foxes) or specialists (hedgehogs), and which of these interactions might appear or disappear. Using the number of citations universities receive for work published in a particular subfield taken from over 20 million scientific publications in the Microsoft Academic Graph, we construct and analyze yearly ecological networks of a dozen academic fields between 1990 to 2015. We find increasingly nested structures across fields, indicating a robust global research ecology, that also infer future acknowledgement across different research areas. We argue this framework can inform policy on scientific research and university funding and evaluation.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.