Jean-Philippe Cointet [email protected] CREA, CNRS/Ecole Polytechnique, Paris, France & TSV, INRA, Ivry sur Seine, France Authors: Carla Taramasco CREA, CNRS/Ecole Polytechnique, Paris, France Camille Roth Dept of Sociology, Univ of Surrey, UK & CREA, CNRS/Ecole Polytechnique, France Title: Socially-mediated concept diffusion in a scientific community Knowledge diffusion is now widely assumed to be socially mediated, while it is unclear to what extent some particular type of social interactions may indeed account for the propagation of a given concept or, put differently, in which manner a concept may diffuse through a given kind of social network. To this end, we aim here at empirically measuring concepts transmission through collaborations in a scientific community. The collaboration network is appraised as a diffusion tree on which concept transmission occurs. More precisely, we observe concept propagation along temporal series of collaborations and focus on authors who start using a given concept. We measure the Abstract: likeliness for an author to have started using the concept owing to a collaboration with at least one other author who previously used this concept. We compare this likeliness to the expected likeliness under a null hypothesis where such collaboration occurs randomly. In other words, we measure the extent to which this adoption may be driven by social factors, where "social" means in our case "exclusively collaboration-based". The empirical study is based on a scientific collaboration network extracted from a database including all publications concerning a precise, well-bounded field, the study of the "zebrafish" among embryologists over the last twenty years. Session: Knowledge Networks Keywords:

social influence , scientists , paper co-atuhorship network , epidemiology , dynamics on networks , diffusion

Submitted Non-Member by: Submitted Tuesday, January 30, 2007 on: Accepted: Yes Event Not determined yet location: Event time: Not determined yet