Distribution of labor, productivity and innovation in collaborative science

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate the process of scientific discovery using an under-exploited source of information: the Polymath projects. Polymath projects are an original attempt to solve a series mathematical problems collectively and in a collaborative online environment. To investigate the Polymath experiment, we analyze all the posts related to the projects that have resulted in a peer-reviewed publication. We focus in particular on the organization of the scientific labor and on the innovations that result from the contributions of the different authors. We find that a high presence of occasional contributors increases the productivity of the most active users and the overall productivity of the forums (i.e., the number of posts grows super-linearly with the number of contributors). We argue that, in large-scale collaborations, the serendipitous interaction between occasional contributors can be crucial to the scientific process, and individual contributions from occasional participants can open new directions of research.

Collaboration and Performance of Citizen Science Projects Addressing the Sustainable Development Goals

“…Mixed methods involving digital traces and questionnaires are traditionally used in social studies describing collaborative activities, for example to understand how social networks shape individual performance in collaborative learning (Poquet et al 2020), or to describe how team interactions and community organization shape collective performance within open research programs (Kokshagina 2021;Masselot et al 2022) or open source communities (Gargiulo et al 2022;Klein et al 2015;Klug and Bagrow 2016). Complementing digital traces, the collection of self-reported data yields qualitative insights across perceived interactions (Deri et al 2018).…”