for helpful comments. Financial support from KU Leuven (GOA/12/003) and the Research Foundation-Flanders (FWO, G.0825.12) is gratefully acknowledged. J. Wang also gratefully acknowledges a postdoctoral fellowship from FWO. Publication data are sourced from Thomson Reuters Web of Science Core Collection. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research. NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been peer-reviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications.
a b s t r a c tThe increasing dominance of team science highlights the importance of understanding the effects of team composition on the creativity of research results. In this paper, we analyze the effect of team size, and field and task variety on creativity. Furthermore, we unpack two facets of creativity in science: novelty and impact. We find that increasing team size has an inverted-U shaped relation with novelty. We also find that the size-novelty relationship is largely due to the relation between size and team field or task variety, consistent with the information processing perspective. On the other hand, team size has a continually increasing relation with the likelihood of a high-impact paper. Furthermore, variety does not have a direct effect on impact, net of novelty. This study develops our understanding of team science and highlights the need for a governance approach to scientific work. We also advance the creativity literature by providing an ex ante objective bibliometric measure that distinguishes novelty from impact, and illustrate the distinct team-level drivers of each. We conclude with a discussion of the policy implications of our findings.
This paper studies the relationship between egocentric collaboration networks and knowledge creation at the individual level. For egocentric networks we focus on the characteristics of tie strength and tie configuration, and knowledge creation is assessed by the number of citations. Using a panel of 1,042 American scientists in five disciplines and fixed effects models, we found an inverted U-shaped relationship between network average tie strength and impact, because an increase in tie strength on the one hand facilitates the collaborative knowledge creation process and on the other hand decreases cognitive diversity. In addition, when the network average tie strength is high, a more skewed network performs better because it still has a "healthy" mixture of weak and strong ties and a balance between exploration and exploitation. Furthermore, the tie strength skewness moderates the effect of network average tie strength: both the initial positive effect and the later negative effect of an increase in tie strength are smaller in a more skewed network than in a less skewed one. 4 his/her position in the global network represents his/her social capital, and social capital affects research performance indirectly, through serving an input for current knowledge creation.However, this paper studies collaboration networks as organizations for knowledge creation and focuses on how the current network affects knowledge creation directly, via its effect on collaborative knowledge creation process and resource mobilization. Specifically, this paper focuses on the effect of tie strength and tie configuration on citation impact at the individual level.This paper makes the following theoretical contributions. First, it adds to the organization of science literature, studying egocentric collaboration networks as organizations for science production. Second, it explores tie configuration within collaboration networks and contributes to the development of a network theory beyond a simple dichotomy between strong and weak ties.The rest of the paper is organized as follows. First, we briefly review the literature on collaborative teams and networks in science and discuss the motivation for studying egocentric networks. Second, we develop hypotheses concerning the effect of tie strength and tie configuration on knowledge creation, drawing literature of science studies, social networks, organization theory, and organizational behavior. We use a panel dataset with both survey and bibliometric information for 1,042 American scientists in five disciplines (biology, chemistry, computer science, earth and atmospheric sciences, and electrical engineering). We incorporate individual fixed effects to account for unobserved time invariant individual heterogeneity and career age and prior performance to control for time variant individual differences. We found (1) an inverted U-shaped relationship between network average tie strength and citation impact, (2) a positive effect of the skewness of tie strength distribution on citation impact, when...
Interdisciplinary research is increasingly recognized as the solution to today’s challenging scientific and societal problems, but the relationship between interdisciplinary research and scientific impact is still unclear. This paper studies the association between the degree of interdisciplinarity and the number of citations at the paper level. Different from previous studies compositing various aspects of interdisciplinarity into a single indicator, we use factor analysis to uncover distinct dimensions of interdisciplinarity corresponding to variety, balance, and disparity. We estimate Poisson models with journal fixed effects and robust standard errors to analyze the divergent relationships between these three factors and citations. We find that long-term (13-year) citations (1) increase at an increasing rate with variety, (2) decrease with balance, and (3) increase at a decreasing rate with disparity. Furthermore, interdisciplinarity also affects the process of citation accumulation: (1) although variety and disparity have positive effects on long-term citations, they have negative effects on short-term (3-year) citations, and (2) although balance has a negative effect on long-term citations, its negative effect is insignificant in the short run. These findings have important implications for interdisciplinary research and science policy.
This is a study of coverage and overlap in secondgeneration social sciences and humanities journal lists, with attention paid to curation and the judgment of scholarliness. We identify four factors underpinning coverage shortfalls: journal language, country, publisher size, and age. Analyzing these factors turns our attention to the process of assessing a journal as scholarly, which is a necessary foundation for every list of scholarly journals. Although scholarliness should be a quality inherent in the journal, coverage falls short because groups assessing scholarliness have different perspectives on the social sciences and humanities literature. That the four factors shape perspectives on the literature points to a deeper problem of fragmentation within the scholarly community. We propose reducing this fragmentation as the best method to reduce coverage shortfalls.
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