Toward a Formal, Visual Framework of Emergent Cognitive Development of Scholars

Understanding the cognitive evolution of researchers as they progress in academia is an important but complex problem; one that belongs to a class of problems, which often require the development of models to gain further understanding of the intricacies of the domain. The research question that we address in this paper is: how to effectively model this temporal cognitive mental development of prolific researchers? Our proposed solution is based on noting that the academic progression and notability of a researcher are linked with a progressive increase in the citation count for the scholar’s refereed publications, quantified using indices such as the Hirsch index. We propose the use of an yearly increment of a scholar’s cognition quantifiable by means of a function of the scholar’s citation index, thereby considering the index as an indicator of the discrete approximation of the scholar’s cognitive development. Using validated agent-based modeling, a paradigm presented as part of our previous work aimed at the development of a cognitive agent-based computing framework, we present both formal as well as visual agent-based complex network representations for this cognitive evolution in the form of a temporal cognitive level network model. As proof of the effectiveness of this approach, we demonstrate the validation of the model using historic data of citations.