Exploratory preferences explain the human fascination for imaginary worlds in fictional stories.

Imaginary worlds are present and often central in many of the most culturally successful modern narrative fictions, be it in novels (e.g., Harry Potter), movies (e.g., Star Wars), video games (e.g., The Legend of Zelda), graphic novels (e.g., One Piece) and TV series (e.g., Game of Thrones). We propose that imaginary worlds are popular because they activate exploratory preferences that evolved to help us navigate the real world and find new fitness-relevant information. Therefore, we hypothesize that the attraction to imaginary worlds is intrinsically linked to the desire to explore novel environments and that both are influenced by the same underlying factors. Notably, the inter-individual and cross-cultural variability of the preference for imaginary worlds should follow the inter-individual and cross-cultural variability of exploratory preferences (with the personality trait Openness-to-experience, age, sex, and ecological conditions). We test these predictions with both experimental and computational methods. For experimental tests, we run a pre-registered online experiment about movie preferences (N = 230). For computational tests, we leverage two large cultural datasets, namely the Internet Movie Database (N = 9424 movies) and the Movie Personality Dataset (N = 3.5 million participants), and use machine-learning algorithms (i.e., random forest and topic modeling). In all, consistent with how the human preference for spatial exploration adaptively varies, we provide empirical evidence that imaginary worlds appeal more to more explorative people, people higher in Openness-to-experience, younger individuals, males, and individuals living in more affluent environments. We discuss the implications of these findings for our understanding of the cultural evolution of narrative fiction and, more broadly, the evolution of human exploratory preferences.

Therapy's Shadow: A Short History of the Study of Resistance to Cancer Chemotherapy.

This article traces the history of research on resistance to drug therapy in oncology using scientometric techniques and qualitative analysis. Using co-citation analysis, we generate maps to visualize subdomains in resistance research in two time periods, 1975-1990 and 1995-2010. These maps reveal two historical trends in resistance research: first, a shift in focus from generic mechanisms of resistance to chemotherapy to a focus on resistance to targeted therapies and molecular mechanisms of oncogenesis; and second, a movement away from an almost exclusive reliance on animal and cell models and toward the generation of knowledge about resistance through clinical trial work. A close reading of highly cited articles within each subdomain cluster reveals specific points of transition from one regime to the other, in particular the failure of several promising theories of resistance to be translated into clinical insights and the emergence of interest in resistance to a new generation of targeted agents such as imatinib and trastuzumab. We argue that the study of resistance in the oncology field has thus become more integrated with research into cancer therapy - rather than constituting it as a separate domain of study, as it has done in the past, contemporary research treats resistance as the flip side to treatment, as therapy's shadow.

[The emergence and development of gene expression profiling: a key component of the 3B (bench, bedside, bytes) in translational research]. / Les réseaux de l'expression génique - Émergence et développement d'un domaine clé de la génomique.

This paper examines the emergence and development of one of the key components of genomics, namely gene expression profiling. It does so by resorting to computer-based methods to analyze and visualize networks of scientific publications. Our results show the central role played by oncology in this domain, insofar as the initial proof-of-principle articles based on a plant model organism have quickly led to the demonstration of the value of these techniques in blood cancers and to applications in the field of solid tumors, and in particular breast cancer. The article also outlines the essential role played by novel bioinformatics and biostatistical tools in the development of the domain. These computational disciplines thus qualify as one of the three corners (in addition to the laboratory and the clinic) of the translational research triangle.

Detection and characterization of translational research in cancer and cardiovascular medicine.

BACKGROUND: Scientists and experts in science policy have become increasingly interested in strengthening translational research. Efforts to understand the nature of translational research and monitor policy interventions face an obstacle: how can translational research be defined in order to facilitate analysis of it? We describe methods of scientometric analysis that can do this. METHODS: We downloaded bibliographic and citation data from all articles published in 2009 in the 75 leading journals in cancer and in cardiovascular medicine (roughly 15,000 articles for each field). We calculated citation relationships between journals and between articles and we extracted the most prevalent natural language concepts. RESULTS: Network analysis and mapping revealed polarization between basic and clinical research, but with translational links between these poles. The structure of the translational research in cancer and cardiac medicine is, however, quite different. In the cancer literature the translational interface is composed of different techniques (e.g., gene expression analysis) that are used across the various subspecialties (e.g., specific tumor types) within cancer research and medicine. In the cardiac literature, the clinical problems are more disparate (i.e., from congenital anomalies to coronary artery disease); although no distinctive translational interface links these fields, translational research does occur in certain subdomains, especially in research on atherosclerosis and hypertension. CONCLUSIONS: These techniques can be used to monitor the continuing evolution of translational research in medicine and the impact of interventions designed to enhance it.

Mapping the emergence and development of translational cancer research.

Cancer research is one of the principal targets of translational research, yet the nature of the relationships between different forms of cancer research remains controversial. The paper examines publications in the cancer field during the 1980-2000 period. A network analysis software program was used to map evolving patterns of inter-citations between cancer publications, their different research levels and the transformation of their relational content. Both inter-citation and content maps provide striking evidence of the consolidation in the 1990s of a translational interface that was practically non existent a few decades before. In 1980, research was polarized according to the allegiance to either a clinical or a laboratory style. This same duality obtains in the year 2000, albeit with the additional presence of a third, biomedical player whose activities are similarly structured by a common orientation, rather than by an exclusive commitment to a specific sub-domain.