Interdisciplinary Networking Impact of the Research Coordination Network (RCN) program

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Intellectual Merit: This project aims to gauge how effective Research Coordination Network (RCN) program awards have been at stimulating research that crosses disciplinary, organizational, institutional, and geographic boundaries. It examines research teaming and research community networking characteristics. It will measure how interdisciplinary articles generated by RCN researchers are. To accomplish these aims, the project will apply a range of bibliometric (i.e., counting research publication activity), text mining, statistical, and visualization methods to learn about the effects of RCN support. The main data being analyzed are abstract records of articles published by RCN researchers and by suitable comparison groups of researchers. Those articles will be separated into 'Before' and 'After' RCN project periods to help determine the effects of RCN support. This should help understand social and intellectual networking pattern evolution and cross-disciplinary research knowledge transfer mechanisms. Given the importance placed on interdisciplinary research processes in science today, such findings would be intellectually important for researchers and for research managers.Broader Impacts: The findings of this research should point to ways to facilitate interdisciplinary research knowledge interchange. This is intended to aid NSF in determining the effectiveness of the RCN program and possible ways to enhance this program?s goals. More broadly, it should offer insights to enrich graduate training programs to enhance young researchers? networking orientation and skills.