Serendipity in Science

Serendipity plays an important role in scientific discovery. Indeed, many of the most important breakthroughs, ranging from penicillin to the electric battery, have been made by scientists who were stimulated by a chance exposure to unsought but useful information. However, not all scientists are equally likely to benefit from such serendipitous exposure. Although scholars generally agree that scientists with a prepared mind are most likely to benefit from serendipitous encounters, there is much less consensus over what precisely constitutes a prepared mind, with some research suggesting the importance of openness and others emphasizing the need for deep prior experience in a particular domain. In this paper, we empirically investigate the role of serendipity in science by leveraging a policy change that exogenously shifted the shelving location of journals in university libraries and subsequently exposed scientists to unsought scientific information. Using large-scale data on 2.4 million papers published in 9,750 journals by 520,000 scientists at 115 North American research universities, we find that scientists with greater openness are more likely to benefit from serendipitous encounters. Following the policy change, these scientists tended to cite less familiar and newer work, and ultimately published papers that were more innovative. By contrast, we find little effect on innovativeness for scientists with greater depth of experience, who, in our sample, tended to cite more familiar and older work following the policy change

Why and Wherefore of Increased Scientific Collaboration

This paper examines international and domestic collaborations using data from an original survey of corresponding authors and Web of Science data of articles that had at least one US coauthor in the fields of Particle and Field Physics, Nanoscience and Nanotechnology, and Biotechnology and Applied Microbiology. The data allow us to investigate the connections among coauthors and the views of corresponding authors about the collaboration. We have four main findings. First, we find that US collaborations have increased across US cities as well as across international borders, with the nature of collaborations across cities resembling that across countries. Second, face-to-face meetings are important in collaborations: most collaborators first met working in the same institution and communicate often through meetings with coauthors from distant locations. Third, the main reason for most collaborations is to combine the specialized knowledge and skills of coauthors, but there are substantial differences in the mode of collaborations between small lab-based science and big science, where international collaborations are more prevalent. Fourth, for biotech, we find that citations to international papers are higher compared to papers with domestic collaborators only, but not for the other two fields. Moreover, in all three fields, papers with the same number of coauthors had lower citations if they were international collaborations. Overall, our findings suggest that all collaborations are best viewed from a framework of collaborations across space broadly, rather than in terms of international as opposed to domestic collaborative activity.Economic