Hedgehogs, Foxes, and the Global Science Ecosystem: Decoding Universities' Research Profiles across Fields with Nested Ecological Networks
Modern scientific research evokes ecological imagery and metaphors, given that it is global, interdependent, and diverse. Ecological network structures—like matrices of species inhabiting islands across an archipelago—can be reordered to form nested patterns. These patterns describe the overall health of ecosystems, place species on a spectrum between being described 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 OpenAlex, we construct and analyze yearly nested ecological networks of a dozen academic fields between 1990 to 2017. We find increasingly nested structures across fields, indicating a robust global research ecology that also infers future acknowledgment in different subfields. We argue that this framework can inform policy on scientific research and university funding and evaluation.
