Collaborative Research: The Impact of Research Costs on the Rate and Direction of Scientific Discovery

了解科学和技术进步需要衡量用于创新努力和产出的资源的速度和方向。该项目利用计算能力的进步，根据研究人员？创意空间中的项目组合。这项研究利用政策变化和研究成本等冲击因素，使用实证研究技术来理解影响科学技术发展方向的因素。这项工作对理解技术变革的速度和方向具有重要意义。具体地说，该项目使用基于机器学习和自然语言处理的技术来衡量已发表研究中关键字的发生率和配置，以量化此类文章组的相似性，以定义想法空间，并随后衡量想法空间如何随着研究成本和公共政策的冲击而演变。这项研究将这些技术应用于三种背景：(A)研究材料成本的变化如何影响运动传感技术中的研究轨迹；(B)量子计算的研究人员如何改变他们的项目组合，以应对一种与既定研究范式不同的有争议的方法；以及(C)制药公司的研究轨迹如何随着竞争对手药物发现项目的消息而改变。

Understanding scientific and technical progress requires measures of both the rate and direction of resources directed to innovative efforts and the outputs produced. This project leverages advances in computational power to map the evolution of research fields based on researchers? project portfolios in idea spaces. The research takes advantages of shocks, such as changes in policies and research costs, to use empirical research techniques to understand the factors that affect the directions into which science and technology evolve. This work has important implications for understanding the rate and direction of technological change. Specifically, the project uses techniques based on machine learning and natural language processing that measure the incidence and configuration of keywords in published research to quantify the similarity of groups of such articles to define idea space and to subsequently measure the ways in which idea space evolve in response to shocks in research costs and public policies. The research applies these techniques to three contexts: (a) how changes in the costs of research materials affect research trajectories in motion-sensing technology, (b) how researchers in quantum computing change their project portfolios in response to a controversial approach that differs from an established research paradigm; and (c) how pharmaceutical firm research trajectories change in response to news about rivals' drug discovery projects.