Gender Disparities in Science? Dropout, Productivity, Collaborations and Success of Male and Female Computer Scientists

Scientific collaborations shape ideas as well as innovations and are both the substrate for, and the outcome of, academic careers. Recent studies show that gender inequality is still present in many scientific practices ranging from hiring to peer-review processes and grant applications. In this work, we investigate gender-specific differences in collaboration patterns of more than one million computer scientists over the course of 47 years. We explore how these patterns change over years and career ages and how they impact scientific success. Our results highlight that successful male and female scientists reveal the same collaboration patterns: compared to scientists in the same career age, they tend to collaborate with more colleagues than other scientists, seek innovations as brokers and establish longer-lasting and more repetitive collaborations. However, women are on average less likely to adapt the collaboration patterns that are related with success, more likely to embed into ego networks devoid of structural holes, and they exhibit stronger gender homophily as well as a consistently higher dropout rate than men in all career ages

The Global Lake Ecological Observatory Network (GLEON): the evolution of grassroots network science

Nine years later, with over 380 members from 40 countries, and 50 publications to its credit, GLEON is growing at a rapid pace and pushing the boundaries of the practice of network science. GLEON is really three networks: a network of lakes, data, and peopl

PICES Press, Vol. 15, No. 2, July 2007

Contents [Individual sections are downloadable from the official URL link listed below]: PICES Science in 2007 (pdf, 0.1 Mb) 2007 Wooster Award (pdf, 0.1 Mb) FUTURE - A milestone reached but our task is not done (pdf, < 0.1 Mb) International symposium on "Reproductive and Recruitment Processes of Exploited Marine Fish Stocks" (pdf, 0.1 Mb) Recent results of the micronekton sampling inter-calibration experiment (pdf, 0.1 Mb) 2007 PICES workshop on "Measuring and monitoring primary productivity in the North Pacific" (pdf, 0.1 Mb) 2007 Harmful Algal Bloom Section annual workshop events (pdf, 0.1 Mb) A global approach for recovery and sustainability of marine resources in Large Marine Ecosystems (pdf, 0.3 Mb) Highlights of the PICES Sixteenth Annual Meeting (pdf, 0.4 Mb) Ocean acidification of the North Pacific Ocean (pdf, 0.3 Mb) Workshop on NE Pacific Coastal Ecosystems (2008 Call for Salmon Survival Forecasts) (pdf, 0.1 Mb) The state of the western North Pacific in the first half of 2007 (pdf, 0.4 Mb) PICES Calendar (pdf, 0.4 Mb) The Bering Sea: Current status and recent events (pdf, 0.3 Mb) PICES Interns (pdf, 0.3 Mb) Recent trends in waters of the subarctic NE Pacific (pdf, 0.3 Mb) Election results at PICES (pdf, 0.2 Mb) A new PICES award for monitoring and data management activities (pdf, < 0.1 Mb

Early environmental field research career exploration: An analysis of impacts on precollege apprentices

Research apprenticeships offer opportunities for deep understanding of scientific practice, transparency about research careers, and possible transformational effects on precollege youth. We examined two consecutive field-based environmental biology apprenticeship programs designed to deliver realistic career exploration and connections to research scientists. The Shaw Institute for Field Training (SIFT) program combines introductory field-skills training with research assistance opportunities, and the subsequent Tyson Environmental Research Fellowships (TERF) program provides immersive internships on university field station–based research teams. In a longitudinal mixed-methods study grounded in social cognitive career theory, changes in youth perspectives were measured during program progression from 10th grade through college, evaluating the efficacy of encouraging career path entry. Results indicate SIFT provided self-knowledge and career perspectives more aligned with reality. During SIFT, differences were found between SIFT-only participants compared with those who progressed to TERF. Transition from educational activities to fieldwork with scientists was a pivotal moment at which data showed decreased or increased interest and confidence. Continuation to TERF provided deeper relationships with role models who gave essential early-career support. Our study indicates the two-stage apprenticeship structure influenced persistence in pursuit of an environmental research career pathway. Recommendations for other precollege environmental career–exploration programs are presented

Scientific elite revisited: Patterns of productivity, collaboration, authorship and impact

Throughout history, a relatively small number of individuals have made a profound and lasting impact on science and society. Despite long-standing, multi-disciplinary interests in understanding careers of elite scientists, there have been limited attempts for a quantitative, career-level analysis. Here, we leverage a comprehensive dataset we assembled, allowing us to trace the entire career histories of nearly all Nobel laureates in physics, chemistry, and physiology or medicine over the past century. We find that, although Nobel laureates were energetic producers from the outset, producing works that garner unusually high impact, their careers before winning the prize follow relatively similar patterns as ordinary scientists, being characterized by hot streaks and increasing reliance on collaborations. We also uncovered notable variations along their careers, often associated with the Nobel prize, including shifting coauthorship structure in the prize-winning work, and a significant but temporary dip in the impact of work they produce after winning the Nobel. Together, these results document quantitative patterns governing the careers of scientific elites, offering an empirical basis for a deeper understanding of the hallmarks of exceptional careers in science

Quantifying the impact of weak, strong, and super ties in scientific careers

Scientists are frequently faced with the important decision to start or terminate a creative partnership. This process can be influenced by strategic motivations, as early career researchers are pursuers, whereas senior researchers are typically attractors, of new collaborative opportunities. Focusing on the longitudinal aspects of scientific collaboration, we analyzed 473 collaboration profiles using an ego-centric perspective which accounts for researcher-specific characteristics and provides insight into a range of topics, from career achievement and sustainability to team dynamics and efficiency. From more than 166,000 collaboration records, we quantify the frequency distributions of collaboration duration and tie-strength, showing that collaboration networks are dominated by weak ties characterized by high turnover rates. We use analytic extreme-value thresholds to identify a new class of indispensable `super ties', the strongest of which commonly exhibit >50% publication overlap with the central scientist. The prevalence of super ties suggests that they arise from career strategies based upon cost, risk, and reward sharing and complementary skill matching. We then use a combination of descriptive and panel regression methods to compare the subset of publications coauthored with a super tie to the subset without one, controlling for pertinent features such as career age, prestige, team size, and prior group experience. We find that super ties contribute to above-average productivity and a 17% citation increase per publication, thus identifying these partnerships - the analog of life partners - as a major factor in science career development.Comment: 13 pages, 5 figures, 1 Tabl

Narrating the Natural History Unit: institutional orderings and spatial strategies

This paper develops a conceptualisation of institutional geographies through participation observation and interviews in the BBC's Natural History Unit (NHU), and the approach of actor network theory. The methodological and theoretical tenets of actor network theory are examined for the insights they offer for understanding the achievements of this pre-eminent centre for the production of natural history films. The scope, scale and longevity of the NHU are analysed through the means by which localised institutional modes of ordering extend through space and over time. Drawing on empirical material, the paper outlines three different modes of ordering, which organise relations between actors in the film-making processes in different ways: prioritising different kinds of institutional arrangements, material resources and spatial strategies in the production of natural history films. Through these three modes of ordering, and through the topological insights of actor network theory, a series of overlapping and interlinked institutional geographies are revealed, through which the identity of the Unit as a centre of excellence for wildlife filmmaking is performed. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved

Supervision, Mentorship and Peer Networks: How Estonian Early Career Researchers Get (or Fail to Get) Support

The paper analyses issues related to supervision and support of early career researchers in Estonian academia. We use nine focus groups interviews conducted in 2015 with representatives of social sciences in order to identify early career researchers’ needs with respect to support, frustrations they may experience, and resources they may have for addressing them. Our crucial contribution is the identification of wider support networks of peers and colleagues that may compensate, partially or even fully, for failures of official supervision. On the basis of our analysis we argue that support for early career researchers should take into account the resources they already possess but also recognise the importance of wider academic culture, including funding and employment patterns, and the roles of supervisors and senior researchers in ensuring successful functioning of support networks. Through analysing the conditions for the development of early career researchers – producers of knowledge – our paper contributes to social epistemology understood as analysis of specific forms of social organisation of knowledge production

Persistence and Uncertainty in the Academic Career

Understanding how institutional changes within academia may affect the overall potential of science requires a better quantitative representation of how careers evolve over time. Since knowledge spillovers, cumulative advantage, competition, and collaboration are distinctive features of the academic profession, both the employment relationship and the procedures for assigning recognition and allocating funding should be designed to account for these factors. We study the annual production n_{i}(t) of a given scientist i by analyzing longitudinal career data for 200 leading scientists and 100 assistant professors from the physics community. We compare our results with 21,156 sports careers. Our empirical analysis of individual productivity dynamics shows that (i) there are increasing returns for the top individuals within the competitive cohort, and that (ii) the distribution of production growth is a leptokurtic "tent-shaped" distribution that is remarkably symmetric. Our methodology is general, and we speculate that similar features appear in other disciplines where academic publication is essential and collaboration is a key feature. We introduce a model of proportional growth which reproduces these two observations, and additionally accounts for the significantly right-skewed distributions of career longevity and achievement in science. Using this theoretical model, we show that short-term contracts can amplify the effects of competition and uncertainty making careers more vulnerable to early termination, not necessarily due to lack of individual talent and persistence, but because of random negative production shocks. We show that fluctuations in scientific production are quantitatively related to a scientist's collaboration radius and team efficiency.Comment: 29 pages total: 8 main manuscript + 4 figs, 21 SI text + fig

The Lotic Intersite Nitrogen Experiments: an example of successful ecological research collaboration

Collaboration is an essential skill for modern ecologists because it brings together diverse expertise, viewpoints, and study systems. The Lotic Intersite Nitrogen eXperiments (LINX I and II), a 17-y research endeavor involving scores of early- to late-career stream ecologists, is an example of the benefits, challenges, and approaches of successful collaborative research in ecology. The scientific success of LINX reflected tangible attributes including clear scientific goals (hypothesis-driven research), coordinated research methods, a team of cooperative scientists, excellent leadership, extensive communication, and a philosophy of respect for input from all collaborators. Intangible aspects of the collaboration included camaraderie and strong team chemistry. LINX further benefited from being part of a discipline in which collaboration is a tradition, clear data-sharing and authorship guidelines, an approach that melded field experiments and modeling, and a shared collaborative goal in the form of a universal commitment to see the project and resulting data products through to completion