EAGER: Structural Characteristics and the Pace of Scientific Advance

Indiana University, Bloomington IN

Investigators

Abstract

Science is organized around specific fields of inquiry that play a crucial role in the advancement of knowledge. By shifting the study of collaboration and productivity to the level of fields provides the potential for major advances understanding advances in science. Such understandings can guide policymakers tasked with allocating scarce funding resources. This project investigates how the composition of research teams in a field affects the pace of scientific advance. In other words, the project examines the impact of the mix of teams in a field on the rate at which scientific fields generate new knowledge, in order to generate fundamental knowledge on the nature of scientific advance and to guide policymakers trying to allocate funding across a portfolio of potential projects. The research focuses on the development of two sets of indicators able to capture field diversity and innovativeness. The first set of indicators is based on text analysis of phrases extracted from titles and abstracts and measures the pace of innovation and scientific advance. These indicators track the rate of concepts appearing, diffusing, and decaying in a field. The second set of indicators quantify the mix of large and small teams as well as the mix of more and less interdisciplinary teams in a field, in other words, the "ecology" of the field. The goal of the indicators is to capture the size and diversity of scientific ecosystems at the level of scientific fields. The project considers physics, astronomy and experimental biology as test cases for developing measures and testing relations between field structure and the pace of innovation over time.