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SciField

SciField is a multi-axis framework for monitoring the health of a scientific field. It builds a longitudinal corpus from a defined set of journals, enriches each article with thematic, epistemic, and novelty signals, and uses those signals to forecast where a field is headed. The project is structured as a sequence of execution sessions across Phases 0–9; this repository is the day-zero scaffolding.

See the plan/ directory in the repository for the full project plan and session-execution roadmap.

Phases at a glance

  • Phase 0 — Scaffolding: Establish the package structure, config system, data layout, and reproducibility infrastructure every subsequent phase builds on.
  • Phase 1 — Corpus: Build, validate, and document the v1 corpus — PMID, year, title, abstract, journal, authors, institutions, MeSH terms, OpenAlex ID, and full citation/reference lists.
  • Phase 2 — Thematic: Produce a stable topic landscape across the 10-journal corpus, with per-journal sub-topic structures for finer-grained analyses.
  • Phase 3 — Epistemic: Extract structured epistemic-quality features (study design, sample size, controls, effect direction) per paper and validate against hand-labels.
  • Phase 4 — Novelty: Compute semantic novelty (embedding distance from prior work) and structural novelty (CD index from the citation graph), then examine their joint distribution.
  • Phase 5 — Forecasting: Train and validate a temporal graph neural network that predicts topic emergence 3 years ahead of conventional detection, against pre-specified baselines.
  • Phase 6 — Integration: Combine the four axes into the three target findings (epistemic cascade, dual-novelty divergence, predictive validity) and generate manuscript figures.
  • Phase 7 — Validation: Scale the framework to the v2 corpus (25–40 journals) and test whether the v1 findings generalize beyond surgery/orthopedics.
  • Phase 8 — Publication: Ship the framework as a polished, installable, documented open-source tool — PyPI, docs site, demo app, Zenodo deposit, tagged release.
  • Phase 9 — Manuscript: Draft, internally and externally review, preprint, and submit the flagship manuscript.