In this paper published in PLoS ONE, we leverage field tags metadata from the open access arXiv repository (1.5M articles) to reconstruct the evolution of 175 research fields from Physics, Maths, CS. We show that the observed rise and fall behaviour of fields is well described by a 2-parameters right-tailed Gumbel distribution, allowing us to rescale fields on a universal time scale and compare them on the same terms. Using delineations from the innovation literature, we then distinguish standard evolutionary stages of creation, adoption, peak, early and late decay, and we quantify characteristics of authors and articles at each stage. We find that early stages are characterised by small interdisciplinary teams of early career researchers publishing disruptive work, while late phases exhibit the role of specialised, large teams building on the previous works in the field.
While we focused on arXiv because of its well-defined, self-reported fields, future work should expand this study to larger, more representative databases with more comprehensive paper and author level metadata. For anyone who wants to explore our data further it is available here: https://zenodo.org/record/6598737. Also, since the time we started this work, a trove of public arXiv data has also been made available at https://github.com/mattbierbaum/arxiv-public-datasets/releases.
Here is a thread summarising the article:
Marc Santolini 
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