Multi-University Research Teams: Shifting Impact, Geography, and Stratification in Science

Jones, Benjamin F.; Wuchty, Stefan; Uzzi, Brian

doi:10.1126/science.1158357

Cited by 645 publications

(507 citation statements)

References 11 publications

(10 reference statements)

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“…Research organization moves from isolated scientists who do all aspects of a project, to teams of scientists, technicians and support staff who require specialized equipment, costly institutions, administrators and accountants. The size of inventing teams grows, a phenomenon paralleled in the increasing size of science authorship teams (Wuchty et al, 2007;Jones et al, 2008). Thus, fields of scientific research follow a characteristic developmental pattern, from general to specialized; from wealthy dilettantes and lone-wolf scholars to large teams with staff and supporting institutions; from knowledge that is generalized and widely useful to research that is specialized and narrowly useful; from simple to complex and from low to high societal costs.…”

Section: Complexity and Innovationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Complexity and the productivity of innovation

2010

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Innovation underpins the industrial way of life. It is assumed implicitly both that it will continue to do so, and that it will produce solutions to the problems we face involving climate and resources. These assumptions underlie the thinking of many economists and the political leaders whom they influence. Such a view assumes that innovation in the future will be as productive as it has been in the recent past. To test whether this is likely to be so, we investigate the productivity of innovation in the United States using data from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. The results suggest that the conventional optimistic view may be unwarranted. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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Section: Complexity and Innovationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Complexity and the productivity of innovation

2010

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“…Finally, our future success will most likely depend on thinking outside our reproductive science and medicine niche and instead taking part in the burgeoning field of team science [48,49]. Interestingly, multi-university collaborations are the fastest growing type of authorship structure in almost all fields of science, and they tend to produce the highest impact manuscripts if at least one toptier university is included [50]. Thus, participation in team science across institutional boundaries has the great potential to boost the impact of our work.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A small field for fertile science: the low visibility of reproductive science in high impact journals

Duncan

Derman

Woodruff

2014

J Assist Reprod Genet

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Purpose Our success as a field and as individuals in reproductive science and medicine relies on our ability to produce high quality work that has broad visibility and impact. A common metric for assessing such success is the quantity of publications that are published in journals with high impact factors. It is unclear, however, how frequently work related to reproductive science and medicine actually appears in what are considered the highest impact journals. Methods To address this gap in knowledge, we first determined how the field of reproductive biology in general compared to other research areas in terms of composite journal impact factor. Second, using a targeted search approach in the PubMed database, we examined the relationship between a journal's impact factor and the number of reproductive research articles published per journal issue. Results We found that compared to other major scientific disciplines, our field lacks journals with impact factors above 4. In addition, primary original research articles on reproductionirrespective of male or female search terms-do not appear often in high impact journals. Instead, there is an increased percentage of secondary reproductive literature in high impact journals compared to topic-specific journals of lower impact. Conclusions There are likely several explanations for why reproductive science and medicine has low visibility, including the field's small relative size, its lack of a specific disease and associated strong advocacy, and its surrounding social, ethical, and political unease. Nevertheless, there are concrete actions we can take to minimize the role of impact factor in our evaluation while simultaneously increasing influence through global awareness of the importance and need for reproductive research.

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“…I, at least, would like to know about similar constants and changes in other sciencesthat Europe is catching up to or passing the USA has been noted many places, and a curious inequality of achievement at least once recently (Jones et al 2008).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A generation of astronomical telescopes, their users, and publications

Trimble

2009

Scientometrics

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Research astronomers and the telescopes they use each have typical life spans of about 40 years. Most of their journals live a good deal longer, though the second most important one today is only 40 years old. This paper looks at numbers for productivity and impact of specific astronomical facilities, changes in equality of opportunities and achievements in observational astronomy, and some aspects of national contributions. The focus is on optical astronomy, though something is also said about radio telescopes and astronomy from space. In summary, nothing stays ''best of class'' for very long; the fraction of the community with access to the most valuable facilities has increased with time (more equality of opportunity); but the fraction of citations earned by the few superstar papers has also increased (less equality of achievement); and the USA remains the host of the most-cited journals and the most productive telescopes, though Europe (meaning in this context the member nations of the European Southern Observatory, the European Space Agency, and the supporters of the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics) are fast closing the gap, with the UK retaining its own journal and some observing facilities not shared with either the USA or other European countries. Detailed examination of specific facilities indicates that size (of telescope, community, and budget) are all of great importance, but that the most significant ''focal plane instrument'' is still the astronomer at the virtual eyepiece. The changes have happened against a background of enormous increases in numbers of astronomers, sizes of available facilities (but not total number), numbers of papers (but not of journals), and numbers of citations per paper. A significant subset of the conclusions on turnover of people and facilities accompanying major growth: opportunity versus achievement; Europe versus the USA; and the trade-off between community size and the influence of individual scientists undoubtedly apply in many other fields.

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Multi-University Research Teams: Shifting Impact, Geography, and Stratification in Science

Cited by 645 publications

References 11 publications

Complexity and the productivity of innovation

Complexity and the productivity of innovation

A small field for fertile science: the low visibility of reproductive science in high impact journals

A generation of astronomical telescopes, their users, and publications

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