The spread of scientific concepts would inspire some of the first research into the transmission of ideas. During the early 1960s, US mathematician William Goffman suggested that the transfer of information between scientists worked much like an epidemic.[3] Just as diseases like malaria spread from person to person via mosquitoes, scientific research often passed from scientist to scientist via academic papers. From Darwin’s theory of evolution to Newton’s laws of motion and Freud’s psychoanalytic movement, new concepts had spread to ‘susceptible’ scientists who came into contact with them.
