Science's main norms prescribe scientists to use citations as acknowledgements of cognitive content irrespective of geographical location. Previous studies, however, suggested that there is a considerable geographical bias in scientific citations. We argue that this geographical bias does not, in itself, falsify the notion that citations reflect acknowledgement of cognitive content, because cognitively related knowledge may be geographically concentrated as well. We analyse the role of organizational, regional and national co-location on citation likelihood for 5.5 million article pairs, and find that the geographical bias in citations is weak once cognitive relatedness is accounted for. Furthermore, we find that the effect of co-location on citation likelihood is strongest at the organizational level, weaker at the regional level, and weakest at the national level. In addition, we show that geographical co-location particularly increases the citation likelihood between two papers when knowledge relatedness between articles is low, suggesting that interdisciplinary research benefits most from co-location. Finally, we find that, when knowledge relatedness is high, the effect of geographical co-location on citation likelihood is non-existent. We discuss the implications regarding policies aimed to discourage strategic citations and to foster interdisciplinary research.
Scientific breakthroughs are commonly understood as discoveries that transform the knowledge frontier, and have a major impact on science, technology and society. Prior literature studying breakthroughs generally treat them as a homogenous group in attempts to identify supportive conditions for their occurrence. In this paper, we argue that there are different types of scientific breakthroughs which differ in their disciplinary occurrence and are associated with different considerations of use and citation impact patterns. We develop a typology of scientific breakthroughs based on three binary dimensions of scientific discoveries and use this typology to, qualitatively, analyse the content of 335 scientific articles that report on breakthroughs. For each dimension, we test associations with scientific disciplines, reported use considerations and scientific impact. We find that most scientific breakthroughs are driven by a question and in line with literature and that paradigm shifting discoveries are rare. Regarding the scientific impact of breakthrough as measured by citations, we find that an article that answers an unanswered question receives more citations, compared to articles that were not motivated by an unanswered question. We conclude that earlier research in which breakthroughs were operationalized as highly cited scientific articles, may thus be biased against the latter.
We analyse academic success using a genealogical approach to the careers of over 95,000 scientists in mathematics and associated fields in physics and chemistry. We look at the effect of Ph.D. supervisors (one’s mentors) on the number of Ph.D. students that one supervises later on (one’s mentees) as a measure of academic success. Supervisors generally provide important inputs in Ph.D. projects, which can have long-lasting effects on academic careers. Moreover, having multiple supervisors exposes one to a diversity of inputs. We show that Ph.D. students benefit from having multiple supervisors instead of a single one. The cognitive diversity of mentors has a subtler effect in that it increases both the likelihood of success (having many mentees later on) and failure (having no mentees at all later on). We understand the effect of diverse mentorship as a high-risk, high-gain strategy: the recombination of unrelated expertise often fails, but sometimes leads to true novelty.
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