Market bubbles emerge when asset prices are driven unsustainably higher than asset values, and shifts in belief burst them. We demonstrate an analogous phenomenon in the case of biomedical knowledge, when promising research receives inflated attention. We introduce a diffusion index that quantifies whether research areas have been amplified within social and scientific bubbles, or have diffused and become evaluated more broadly. We illustrate the utility of our diffusion approach in tracking the trajectories of cardiac stem cell research (a bubble that collapsed) and cancer immunotherapy (which showed sustained growth). We then trace the diffusion of 28,504 subfields in biomedicine comprising nearly 1.9 M papers and more than 80 M citations to demonstrate that limited diffusion of biomedical knowledge anticipates abrupt decreases in popularity. Our analysis emphasizes that restricted diffusion, implying a socio-epistemic bubble, leads to dramatic collapses in relevance and attention accorded to scientific knowledge.

当资产价格被不可持续地推高于资产价值时，市场泡沫就会出现，而信念的转变会打破它们。我们在生物医学知识的情况下展示了类似的现象，当有前途的研究受到夸大的关注时。我们引入了一个扩散指数，用于量化研究领域是否在社会和科学泡沫中被放大，或者已经扩散并被更广泛地评估。我们说明了我们的扩散方法在跟踪心脏干细胞研究（泡沫破裂）和癌症免疫疗法（显示持续增长）轨迹方面的效用。然后，我们追踪了生物医学中 28,504 个子领域的传播，包括近 1.9 篇 M 论文和超过 80 M 次引用，以证明生物医学知识的有限传播预计会突然下降。我们的分析强调，受限传播，意味着社会认识泡沫，导致对科学知识的相关性和关注度急剧崩溃。