Basic Premises of High-Energy Bibliometrics

Traditional bibliometrics has three fundamental constraints: 1) it relies on structural and semantic content of academic research, without physical interaction; 2) it is descriptive and retrospective, analyzing existing research rather than actively participating in the research process; 3) its methodologies are explanatory but not experimental, thus un-falsifiable and unable to test hypotheses through physical experimentation.

Compare that to the study of physical phenomena: it is empirical, interactive, and experimental. Physicists manipulate physical systems through controlled, carefully designed experiments to test hypotheses and uncover underlying principles, and only come to conclusion after rigorous testing and validation through mathematical analysis.

At 3t.al. Labs, we propose the paradigm of high-energy bibliometrics. This approach treats academic papers not as static, purely semantic objects in concept space, but as physical and movable entities in spacetime proxied by their physical forms (printed copies or digital storage media). We believe that bibliometrics, including the evaluation of the quality of research, is better viewed as an combination of concept-space and physical-space phenomena, and that the physical properties of research outputs are crucial to understanding their impact.

Our lab consists of a highly interdisciplinary team, split into four main groups: the theory group, who develops the theoretical and mathematical framework and hypotheses; the experiment group, who designs and manufactures the experiment equipment and conducts the experiments; the analysis group, who performs the data analysis and interpretation, validating and refining the theory; and the operationalization group, who translates the the results into practical applications and tools for our downstream users, i.e., the research community at large.