An official website of the United States government
Abstract As science becomes ever more collaborative, the mechanisms for working in large and more diverse groups become more necessary. In the present article, I explore the utility of within-group collaboration agreements on participant conduct toward other project participants, within-group data sharing, and authorship of published manuscripts for research groups. Such agreements can solidify the expectations of the interactions among collaborators, potential rewards, and a feeling of security for those involved in the projects. They could also lead to more productive and satisfying research, as well as improving the training of future scientists.
more »
« less
Collaboration and topic switches in science
Abstract Collaboration is a key driver of science and innovation. Mainly motivated by the need to leverage different capacities and expertise to solve a scientific problem, collaboration is also an excellent source of information about the future behavior of scholars. In particular, it allows us to infer the likelihood that scientists choose future research directions via the intertwined mechanisms of selection and social influence. Here we thoroughly investigate the interplay between collaboration and topic switches. We find that the probability for a scholar to start working on a new topic increases with the number of previous collaborators, with a pattern showing that the effects of individual collaborators are not independent. The higher the productivity and the impact of authors, the more likely their coworkers will start working on new topics. The average number of coauthors per paper is also inversely related to the topic switch probability, suggesting a dilution of this effect as the number of collaborators increases.
more »
« less
- Award ID(s):
- 1927418
- PAR ID:
- 10485713
- Publisher / Repository:
- Nature Publishing Group
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Scientific Reports
- Volume:
- 14
- Issue:
- 1
- ISSN:
- 2045-2322
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
-
This article presents findings on international research collaboration from a National Science Foundation-funded study with 83 faculty in science and engineering (S&E) who returned to India after studying and working in the United States. These faculty members were brought up in the Indian socio-cultural context, but they were professionalized in the scientific culture of Western academia. When they returned to India to take a faculty position, they knew collaborators in the US with desired skills, including their advisors. Yet, returned Indian migrant faculty face significant challenges in establishing successful international research collaboration with their American peers. Interestingly, this is not the case with collaborators from Europe and other parts of the world with whom they had little connection before moving to India. Findings show some inequities that exist between scientists and engineers in the US and India that pertain to resources and attitudes towards collaboration.more » « less
-
Shared gaze, where collaborators can see each other's point of gaze visualized on their screen in real time, is a novel non-verbal mechanism that augments remote collaborations and increases shared awareness and common grounding. While past studies have focused on well-structured tasks and analyzed task performance and efficiency, our study explores the domain of collaborative drawing for recreational purposes and focuses on collaborators' own perceptions. We surveyed 75 users of online collaborative drawing platforms who mostly drew collaboratively for recreation and artistic growth; they reported the importance of communication but also of retaining individual space despite the collaborative setting. Informed by this and prior research on shared gaze, we evaluate collaboration by allowing two collaborators to draw synchronously on a shared canvas and share their point of gaze. We conducted a study with 24 pairs that drew collaboratively under all combinations of shared gaze and voice communication. Combining voice and shared gaze was perceived to reach the best balance between tightly coupled collaboration and parallel individual execution. Shared gaze led to higher spatial awareness and less turn-taking was observed in conditions that shared gaze was present. Surprisingly, many participants found the lack of any communication medium to afford the highest degree of divergent thinking. Our findings provide guidelines for adaptive tools that consider individual preferences as well as the nature of the task to better support remote collaborations that are open-ended and prize creativity.more » « less
-
null (Ed.)While scientific collaboration is critical for a scholar, some collaborators can be more significant than others, e.g., lifetime collaborators. It has been shown that lifetime collaborators are more influential on a scholar’s academic performance. However, little research has been done on investigating predicting such special relationships in academic networks. To this end, we propose Scholar2vec, a novel neural network embedding for representing scholar profiles. First, our approach creates scholars’ research interest vector from textual information, such as demographics, research, and influence. After bridging research interests with a collaboration network, vector representations of scholars can be gained with graph learning. Meanwhile, since scholars are occupied with various attributes, we propose to incorporate four types of scholar attributes for learning scholar vectors. Finally, the early-stage similarity sequence based on Scholar2vec is used to predict lifetime collaborators with machine learning methods. Extensive experiments on two real-world datasets show that Scholar2vec outperforms state-of-the-art methods in lifetime collaborator prediction. Our work presents a new way to measure the similarity between two scholars by vector representation, which tackles the knowledge between network embedding and academic relationship mining.more » « less
-
Bias and polarization are not just about placing misinformation on the Web but also involve concerted efforts to change how we navigate it. One of the strongest points of Wikipedia is to allows readers to easily navigate a topic, through its hyperlinks structure. Thus, it is crucial to ensure a user to have the same probability of being exposed to knowledge that expresses different viewpoints concerning the given topic. In this work, we investigate whether the topology and polarization of a topic-induced-graph (e.g. U.S. Politics induced network) has an impact on users' navigation paths making them biased toward one of the possible topic perspectives. Modeling users behaviour and exploiting Wikipedia clickstreams, we analyze users exposure to different leaning during their sessions, thus the chance of being trapped within a knowledge bubble presenting a unique viewpoint about the topic, and differences among users that start their navigation from articles representing different perspectives.more » « less
