Social Dynamics of Science

Sun, Xiaoling; Kaur, Jasleen; Milojević, Staša; Flammini, Alessandro; Menczer, Filippo

doi:10.1038/srep01069

Cited by 114 publications

(136 citation statements)

References 35 publications

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“…This convergence of collaboration patterns for scientific fields might be an element of the "social dynamics of science" (29) to support the evolution of disciplines. However, much work remains if we are to understand in more depth the reasons for and the implications of greater internationalization in scientific collaboration across different research fields.…”

Section: Discussion and Concluding Observationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Moreover, Small (18) argues that "crossover fields are frequently encountered, and the location of a field can occasionally defy its disciplinary origins." Sun et al (29) claim that some theories consider the social interaction among groups of scientists "as the driving force behind the evolution of disciplines" (cf. 3,26,30,31).…”

Section: Discussion and Concluding Observationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Evolution and convergence of the patterns of international scientific collaboration

Coccia

Wang

2016

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

198

101

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International research collaboration plays an important role in the social construction and evolution of science. Studies of science increasingly analyze international collaboration across multiple organizations for its impetus in improving research quality, advancing efficiency of the scientific production, and fostering breakthroughs in a shorter time. However, long-run patterns of international research collaboration across scientific fields and their structural changes over time are hardly known. Here we show the convergence of international scientific collaboration across research fields over time. Our study uses a dataset by the National Science Foundation and computes the fraction of papers that have international institutional coauthorships for various fields of science. We compare our results with pioneering studies carried out in the 1970s and 1990s by applying a standardization method that transforms all fractions of internationally coauthored papers into a comparable framework. We find, over 1973–2012, that the evolution of collaboration patterns across scientific disciplines seems to generate a convergence between applied and basic sciences. We also show that the general architecture of international scientific collaboration, based on the ranking of fractions of international coauthorships for different scientific fields per year, has tended to be unchanged over time, at least until now. Overall, this study shows, to our knowledge for the first time, the evolution of the patterns of international scientific collaboration starting from initial results described by literature in the 1970s and 1990s. We find a convergence of these long-run collaboration patterns between the applied and basic sciences. This convergence might be one of contributing factors that supports the evolution of modern scientific fields.

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Section: Discussion and Concluding Observationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Discussion and Concluding Observationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Evolution and convergence of the patterns of international scientific collaboration

Coccia

Wang

2016

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

198

101

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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“…This line of research remains to be explored more thoroughly and, hence, a comprehensive study on the weighted version of these networks will provide a leap in understanding the magnitude of these variations in patterns. Furthermore, study into other attributes that may also covary with funding, such as the degree of interdisciplinary research, will allow us to gain an insight into how mechanisms (39,40) for formulating partnerships have evolved, because the impact of funding is highly likely to be multidimensional.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Anatomy of funded research in science

Mondragón

Latora

2015

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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Seeking research funding is an essential part of academic life. Funded projects are primarily collaborative in nature through internal and external partnerships, but what role does funding play in the formulation of these partnerships? Here, by examining over 43,000 scientific projects funded over the past three decades by one of the major government research agencies in the world, we characterize how the funding landscape has changed and its impacts on the underlying collaboration networks across different scales. We observed rising inequality in the distribution of funding and that its effect was most noticeable at the institutional level-the leading universities diversified their collaborations and increasingly became the knowledge brokers in the collaboration network. Furthermore, it emerged that these leading universities formed a rich club (i.e., a cohesive core through their close ties) and this reliance among them seemed to be a determining factor for their research success, with the elites in the core overattracting resources but also rewarding in terms of both research breadth and depth. Our results reveal how collaboration networks organize in response to external driving forces, which can have major ramifications on future research strategy and government policy. , and tremendous effort has been put in place in maximizing research output, because assessment outcomes often have a direct financial impact on an institution's revenue (1). Bibliometrics are commonly used for this kind of performance evaluations (2-7), and the volume of grant income is also generally seen as a good indicator of performance. Although many studies have examined the collaboration patterns originating from publication information (8)(9)(10)(11)(12)(13)(14), little is known about the characteristics of project collaborations supported by research funding, which is undoubtedly a type of research output in its own right, but also the origin of other research outputs.The volume of funding is often subject to direct and indirect constraints arising from internal research strategies and different levels of policy set out by the funding bodies and ultimately by the national government. This manifests into different emphases on both the research area and mode of collaboration, and potentially influences the way we form a project team. We have already seen examples of adaptive changes in our collaboration practices. For instance, research in the science and engineering sector is said to be increasingly interorganizational (15). In addition, there are different theories on the factors that may affect the establishment of a collaboration and how well a research team operates (13, 16). Elite universities were recognized as catalysts for facilitating largescale multipartner research collaborations (15), and multidisciplinary collaborations were found to have higher potential to foster research outcomes (17). As a result, the setup of a project consortium for a grant application might require considerable strategic planning, because who and...

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“…Recent studies have used agent-based models of author behavior to explain the patterns in publishing behavior that one sees in different fields of science (e.g. [20,32]). Once again, most of these studies have relied on manually annotated data sets, and as such, they have historically been limited to only a handful of fields.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Network assembly of scientific communities of varying size and specificity

Citron

Way

2018

Journal of Informetrics

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How does the collaboration network of researchers coalesce around a scientific topic? What sort of social restructuring occurs as a new field develops? Previous empirical explorations of these questions have examined the evolution of co-authorship networks associated with several fields of science, each noting a characteristic shift in network structure as fields develop. Historically, however, such studies have tended to rely on manually annotated datasets and therefore only consider a handful of disciplines, calling into question the universality of the observed structural signature. To overcome this limitation and test the robustness of this phenomenon, we use a comprehensive dataset of over 189,000 scientific articles and develop a framework for partitioning articles and their authors into coherent, semantically-related groups representing scientific fields of varying size and specificity. We then use the resulting population of fields to study the structure of evolving co-authorship networks. Consistent with earlier findings, we observe a global topological transition as the coauthorship networks coalesce from a disjointed aggregate into a dense giant connected component that dominates the network. We validate these results using a separate, complimentary corpus of scientific articles, and, overall, we find that the previously reported characteristic structural evolution of a scientific field's associated co-authorship network is robust across a large number of scientific fields of varying size, scope, and specificity. Additionally, the framework developed in this study may be used in other scientometric contexts in order to extend studies to compare across a larger range of scientific disciplines.

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Social Dynamics of Science

Cited by 114 publications

References 35 publications

Evolution and convergence of the patterns of international scientific collaboration

Evolution and convergence of the patterns of international scientific collaboration

Anatomy of funded research in science

Network assembly of scientific communities of varying size and specificity

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