PublicationHarvester: An Open-Source Software Tool for Science Policy Research

We present PublicationHarvester, an open-source software tool for gathering publication information on individual life scientists. The software interfaces with MEDLINE, and allows the end-user to specify up to four MEDLINE-formatted names for each researcher. Using these names along with a user-specified search query, PublicationHarvester generates yearly publication counts, optionally weighted by Journal Impact Factors. These counts are further broken-down by order on the authorship list (first, last, second, next-to-last, middle) and by publication type (clinical trials, regular journal articles, reviews, letters/editorials, etc.) The software also generates a keywords report at the scientist-year level, using the Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) assigned by the National Library of Medicine to each publication indexed by Medline. The software, source code, and user manual can be downloaded at http://www.stellman-greene.com/PublicationHarvester/

The Diffusion of Scientific Knowledge across Time and Space

This chapter discusses the consequences of academic mobility and the extent to which the movement of high-achieving faculty members affects both scientific and commercialization activities at their old and new schools. It looks at articles published by, and patents granted to, the mobile scientist before they departed for the new school, comparing these to similar outputs by scientists who did not move. The heterogeneity that can distort simpler comparisons can be limited. The analysis suggests that the citations to a departing scientist's articles from the university where he or she departs are barely affected by the move. However, citations to the departing scientist's patents (whether made in articles or patents) decline sharply at the originating school. This suggests that the physical proximity of the researcher is important to ensuring knowledge flows to industry. Citations to the scientist's work at his or her new location increase dramatically once the move is complete. Barriers to scientific mobility may actually be socially detrimental, as they prevent the kind of knowledge gains from the mixing of ideas. Keywords: diffusion; scientific knowledge; professional transitions; academic mobility; physical proximity; researche

Superstar Extinction

We estimate the magnitude of spillovers generated by 112 academic "superstars" who died pre- maturely and unexpectedly, thus providing an exogenous source of variation in the structure of their collaborators' coauthorship networks. Following the death of a superstar, we find that collaborators experience, on average, a lasting 5 to 8% decline in their quality-adjusted publication rates. By exploring interactions of the treatment effect with a variety of star, coauthor and star/coauthor dyad characteristics, we seek to adjudicate between plausible mechanisms that might explain this finding. Taken together, our results suggest that spillovers are circumscribed in idea space, but less so in physical or social space. In particular, superstar extinction reveals the boundaries of the scientific field to which the star contributes — the "invisible college."

Incentives and Creativity: Evidence from the Academic Life Sciences

Despite its presumed role as an engine of economic growth, we know surprisingly little about the drivers of scientific creativity. In this paper, we exploit key differences across funding streams within the academic life sciences to estimate the impact of incentives on the rate and direction of scientific exploration. Specifically, we study the careers of investigators of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), which tolerates early failure, rewards long-term success, and gives its appointees great freedom to experiment; and grantees from the National Institute of Health, which are subject to short review cycles, pre-defined deliverables, and renewal policies unforgiving of failure. Using a combination of propensity-score weighting and difference-in-differences estimation strategies, we find that HHMI investigators produce high- impact papers at a much higher rate than a control group of similarly-accomplished NIH-funded scientists. Moreover, the direction of their research changes in ways that suggest the program induces them to explore novel lines of inquiry.

Public R&D Investments and Private-sector Patenting: Evidence from NIH Funding Rules

We quantify the impact of scientific grant funding at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) on patenting by pharmaceutical and biotechnology firms. Our article makes two contributions. First, we use newly constructed bibliometric data to develop a method for flexibly linking specific grant expenditures to private-sector innovations. Second, we take advantage of idiosyncratic rigidities in the rules governing NIH peer review to generate exogenous variation in funding across research areas. Our results show that NIH funding spurs the development of private-sector patents: a $10 million boost in NIH funding leads to a net increase of 2.7 patents. Though valuing patents is difficult, we report a range of estimates for the private value of these patents using different approaches.National Science Foundation (U.S.) (Award SBE-0738142)National Institutes of Health (U.S.) (Grant P01-AG039347

The Diffusion of Scientific Knowledge Across Time and Space: Evidence from Professional Transitions for the Superstars of Medicine

Are scientific knowledge flows embodied in individuals, or "in the air"? To answer this question, we measure the effect of labor mobility in a sample of 9,483 elite academic life scientists on the citation trajectories associated with individual articles (resp. patents) published (resp. granted) before the scientist moved to a new institution. We find that article-to-article citations from the scientific community at the superstar's origin location are barely affected by their departure. In contrast, article-to-patent citations, and especially patent-to-patent citations, decline at the origin location following a star's departure, suggesting that spillovers from academia to industry are not completely disembodied. We also find that article-to-article citations at the superstar's destination location markedly increase after they move. Our results suggest that, to be realized, knowledge flows to industry may require more face-to-face interaction than those to academics. Moreover, to the extent that academic scientists do not internalize the effect of their location decisions on the circulation of ideas, our results raise the intriguing possibility that barriers to labor mobility in academic science limit the recombination of individual bits of knowledge, resulting in a suboptimal rate of scientific exploration.

Revisiting the transatlantic divergence over GMOs: Toward a cultural-political analysis

'Revisiting the transatlantic divergence over GMOs: towards a cultural-political analysis' applies a constructivist perspective to the persistent transatlantic divergence over the regulation of GM foods and crops. Political economy and institutionalism have so far dominated the literature. Notwithstanding their crucial insights, this article argues that to achieve a better understanding of the nature and depth of transatlantic regulatory divergence, one should also study prevalent cultural values and identity-related public concerns regarding food and agriculture. These factors can be identified in public opinion trends and have fuelled Europeans' resistance, while contributing to relative regulatory stability in the US. By conceptualizing cultural contexts as catalytic structures, the article also differs from more explicitly discursive accounts of political mobilization. The cultural politics of agricultural biotechnology (agbiotech) relies both on pre-existing values and identities, on the one hand, and on the strategies (and material or other power resources) of political agents