Hedgehogs, foxes, and global science ecosystems: Decoding universities' research profiles across fields with nested ecological networks

Modern scientific research evokes ecological imagery and metaphors, given that it is global, interdependent, and diverse. Ecological network structures—like matrices of species inhabiting islands across an archipelago—can be reordered to form nested patterns. These patterns describe the overall health of ecosystems, place species on a spectrum between being described as generalists (foxes) or specialists (hedgehogs), and which of these interactions might appear or disappear. Using the number of citations universities receive for work published in a particular subfield taken from over 66 million scientific publications in OpenAlex, we construct and analyze yearly nested ecological networks of a dozen academic fields between 1990 and 2017. We find increasingly nested structures across fields infer future acknowledgment in different subfields. We argue that this framework can inform policy on scientific research and university funding and evaluation. •We model global research in 12 fields as nested ecological networks, with universities as species and subfields as their inhabited sites.•Using citations from over 66M papers in OpenAlex (1990-2017), we measure yearly nested structures and university entropy.•Entropy in networks shows prominent universities as fox-like (many subfields) and others as hedgehog-like (few subfields).•Nested structures in networks predict universities' future research capacities, potentially guiding research and funding policies.