Collaborative Research: New Methods to Enhance Our Understanding of the Diversity of Science

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This project focuses on the development and implementation of new quantitative methods to provide a deeper understanding of science policy interventions. By building analytic tools that capture the diversity of science, this project moves beyond existing methods that typically analyze the rate of scientific innovation. This move is an important next step in the "science of science policy" agenda:Intellectual Merit: Although understanding of institutional changes on the rate of inventive activity has improved markedly in recent years, effective science policy interventions must also be grounded in an understanding of their impact on diversity as well as productivity, construed both in terms of idea diversity -- the array of different ideas derived from novel scientific insights -- and individual diversity -- the variety of people and organizations in social space engaged in scientific progress. To move forward with this crucial agenda requires a rich new set of tools. In developing such tools, this project extends prior work that focuses on "citation-counting," combining novel approaches from social and computer sciences to represent and analyze publication, patent and grant data in idea and social space. Specifically, the tools integrate two powerful methods: (a) statistical topic modeling and (b) social network analysis. Broader Impact: These methods can also be extended to examine diversity across national, social and topic boundaries, thus providing quantitative tools to characterize issues of key significance in debates over national competitiveness. While these science policy questions could be addressed in a wide variety of settings, this project focuses on the varied data associated with the human genome and human genetics.