The Use of Dissimilarity Measures for the Study of Evolution in Scientific Fields

Abstract

One of the key issues in evolution of scientific field is to quantify the dissimilarity between two collections of scientific publications in literature. Many existing works study the evolution based on one or two dissimilarity measures, despite the fact that there are many different dissimilarity measures. Finding the appropriate dissimilarity measures among such a collection of choices is of fundamental importance to the study of scientific evolution. In this paper, we attempt to study the use of dissimilarity measures in scientific evolution.