The analysis of a scientist’s decision to conduct research in a specific scientific field is an interesting way to trace the emergence of a new technology. The growth of a research community in size and persistence is an important indicator of a new scientific field’s vitality. Using a case study on triboelectric nanogenerator (TENG) technology, this study identifies how research participation and community dynamics evolve during the emergence phase of a technology, and further what are the key conditions and determinants of the emergent author network. The study uses scientific publication data from 2012 through 2017 extracted from the Web of Science database. Results show communities emerging through actors’ close proximity rather than from their shared thematic orientation. For individual researchers, the boundary between prior research and TENG research was negligible partly questioning the existence Kuhnian paradigm shifts.

Introduction

Emergence is what a “self-organizing process produces” (Corning, 2002). Self-organization requires actors, organizations and individuals that will take part in the process of emergence. In the context of technological emergence, the dynamics of actors taking a role in the discovery process have been broadly analyzed. Researchers have studied the emergence of research networks through co-authorship (Suominen, 2014), co-citation (Boyack and Klavans, 2010), and bibliographical coupling (Jarneving, 2007). Researchers have used others studies to examine whether authors share terminology and create persistent new research topics that might be emerging (Guo et al., 2011; Small et al., 2014; Suominen and Toivanen, 2015). In practice, an actor’s role has been operationalized through proxies such as the average number of authors per paper, the number of contributing organizations, and the number of countries or cities in which the authors conduct research. In 1969, Ayres (1969) put forward a framework for the self-organizing dynamic process of actors. This process was based on the number of actors being a function of an already known and interesting idea left within a field. Ayres followed a Humboldtian notion that the progression of technology and selection of research topics are the function of the availability of novel ideas. Ayres drew from Holton (1962), who stated that only a finite lode of interesting ideas exists within a scientific field. Once a scientist opens a new lode via a scientific discovery, more investigators migrate to the new field. This phenomenon is called a ‘gold rush’ as scholars “defect from their old field, in search for greener pasture” (Ayres, 1969). As the mine empties, making new discoveries more challenging and scarce, researchers are forced to migrate yet again to new opportunities (Ayres, 1969).