Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

A scientist’s academic pursuit can follow a winding path.Starting with one topic of research in earlier career, one maylater pursue topics that relate remotely to the initial point.Philosophers and cognitive scientists have proposed theoriesabout how science has developed, but their emphasis is typi-cally not on explaining the processes of innovation in individ-ual scientists. We examine regularity in the emerging order of ascientist’s publications over time. Our basic premise is that sci-entific papers should emerge in non-arbitrary ways that tend tofollow a process of chaining, whereby novel papers are linkedto existing papers with closely related ideas. We evaluate thisproposal with a set of probabilistic models on the historicalpublications from 70 Turing Award winners. We show that anexemplar model of chaining best explains the data among thealternative models, mirroring recent findings on chaining in thegrowth of linguistic meaning.