The effect of multidisciplinary collaborations on research diversification

This work verifies whether research diversification by a scientist is in some measure related to their collaboration with multidisciplinary teams. The analysis considers the publications achieved by 5300 Italian academics in the sciences over the period 2004-2008. The findings show that a scientist's outputs resulting from research diversification are more often than not the result of collaborations with multidisciplinary teams. The effect becomes more pronounced with larger and particularly with more diversified teams. This phenomenon is observed both at the overall level and for the disciplinary macro-areas

Authorship analysis of specialized vs diversified research output

The present work investigates the relations between amplitude and type of collaboration (intramural, extramural domestic or international) and output of specialized versus diversified research. By specialized or diversified research, we mean within or beyond the author's dominant research topic. The field of observation is the scientific production over five years from about 23,500 academics. The analyses are conducted at the aggregate and disciplinary level. The results lead to the conclusion that in general, the output of diversified research is no more frequently the fruit of collaboration than is specialized research. At the level of the particular collaboration types, international collaborations weakly underlie the specialized kind of research output; on the contrary, extramural domestic and intramural collaborations are weakly associated with diversified research. While the weakness of association remains, exceptions are observed at the level of the individual disciplines

Disciplinary identity of game scholars: an outline

There has been academic research work directed at games and play for decades, but the field has been somewhat scattered, and around the turn of the millennium the idea of establishing a new discipline, dedicated to the study of games in their own right gained prominence. The conference, journal and other publication activity in games research has expanded during the last decade, but it remains unclear how many contemporary academics working on games could be seen to represent a unified group, sharing a common disciplinary identity. This paper reports the first results from an international survey (valid n = 544), carried out among the DiGRA mailing list subscribers, as well as among the members of ECREA and ICA games research groups, aimed at probing the background education, orientation and academic practices of games researchers. The findings highlight the great diversity of educational backgrounds and of the current self-identified research fields, but also the dynamic interdisciplinary changes from one field to another, and how strong the identification as a “digital games researcher” is among the survey respondents

Distribution of knowledge production in the chemical sciences in the US

Thesis (M.B.A.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management, 2011.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 43-44).A citation analysis was carried out to gain an understanding of the geographical and institutional distribution of highly cited articles in the chemical sciences in the US over the last thirty years. The contribution of US chemistry departments was determined by quantifying the number of highly cited articles published by individual authors or groups of authors from the same department. Articles stemming from collaborative research across schools were not considered. The results show that a dilution in intradepartmental knowledge production has occurred both on a geographical and institutional level. Three chemistry departments have emerged as strong producers of high impact articles over the last thirty years: the University of North Carolina, Texas A&M University and the University of Utah. In terms of aggregate numbers of highly cited articles these three schools are in the top ten of over seventy schools which were evaluated; their chemistry departments are en par in terms of scientific impact with those from Ivy League schools like Stanford University, Harvard University and the California Institute of Technology. While the literature reports increasing concentration for the US research base, the present analysis shows a dilution in chemical knowledge production when collaborative efforts across departments and schools are excluded. This finding suggests that the increase in concentration in the US science base is not a uniform trend when studied on a more granular level.by Peter A. Lohse.M.B.A

Are the strategic research agendas of researchers in the social sciences determinants of research productivity?

This study analyzes the association between the strategic research agendas of researchers in the social sciences and their research performance. Based on a worldwide sample of 604 researchers, this study assesses whether researchers’ strategic research agendas are predictors of both short-term (last 3 years) and long-term career publications and citations, after controlling for relevant literature-informed determinants of research productivity. The results show that, in a short-term perspective, research agendas have a limited association with productivity and visibility. Solely the research agendas strategically oriented towards publishing and those collaborative in nature have positive associations with research productivity and visibility. This changes when a long-term perspective is considered. Over the course of a career, research agendas are significantly associated with number of publications and citations. Research agendas oriented towards publishing and collaboration, and those focused on a single field of knowledge, prestige gain and discovery have a positive effect on career research performance, while those research agendas that are overspecialized, dispersed over several fields of knowledge and topics, and influenced by a mentor have opposite associations. This study also finds that prolific research productivity shapes one’s strategic research agenda: the more one publishes, the more one is bound to have a strategic research agenda that is focused on prestige, discovery, a further drive to publish, engagement in a multitude of topics to research, and pursuing multidisciplinary and collaborative research. This effect is driven by an accumulation of publications, not citations. These findings highlight how strategic research choices interact with the individual performance of researchers in the social sciences in performativity-oriented research landscapes.info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersio

Expertise diversity of teams predicts originality and long-term impact in science and technology

Despite the growing importance of teams in producing innovative and high-impact science and technology, it remains unclear how expertise diversity among team members relates to the originality and impact of the work they produce. Here, we develop a new method to quantify the expertise distance of researchers based on their prior career histories and apply it to 23 million scientific publications and 4 million patents. We find that across science and technology, expertise-diverse teams tend to produce work with greater originality. Teams with more diverse expertise have no significant impact advantage in the short- (2 years) or mid-term (5 years). Instead, they exhibit substantially higher long-term impact (10 years), increasingly attracting larger cross-disciplinary influence. This impact premium of expertise diversity among team members becomes especially pronounced when other dimensions of team diversity are missing, as teams within the same institution or country appear to disproportionately reap the benefits of expertise diversity. While gender-diverse teams have relatively higher impact on average, teams with varied levels of gender diversity all seem to benefit from increased expertise diversity. Given the growing knowledge demands on individual researchers, implementation of incentives for original research, and the tradeoffs between short-term and long-term impacts, these results may have implications for funding, assembling, and retaining teams with originality and long-lasting impacts.Comment: 31 pages, 5 figure