Abstract for: What is my Jay Forrester Number? Exploring Networks in System Dynamics

What is your Forrester Number? How many degrees of separation are there between you and Jay Forrester, the founder of system dynamics? The System Dynamics Society’s bibliography dataset offers an opportunity to find this number and to visualize co-author networks in the system dynamics community. The bibliography includes over 16,000 articles, conference proceedings, dissertations, and other works in system dynamics. Co-author networks were constructed using the NetworkX library in Python. Conference proceedings threads were classified using a large language model applied to titles and abstracts, with manual checks. Paper similarities were computed using SPECTER, a transformer model pretrained on scientific documents. Web apps were built so that community members can explore the results. Two publicly accessible web-based tools were developed. The System Dynamics Bibliography Explorer covers 16,842 papers by 12,407 authors and enables community members to find their Forrester Number and explore co-author networks. A supplementary conference proceedings tool provides additional features for conference proceedings since 2005, including finding similar papers and visualizing organization collaboration networks. The tools presented enable interactive exploration of co-author networks, publications, and other aspects of the system dynamics field. This work supports the System Dynamic Society’s goal of facilitating further collaboration among members of the system dynamics community. Community members can use these tools to identify future collaborators (individuals or organizations) as well as publications of interest. Coding assistance