EAGER: Collaborative Research: Structural Characteristics and the Pace of Scientific Advance

科学是围绕在知识进步中发挥关键作用的特定研究领域而组织的。通过将对协作和生产力的研究转移到领域的层面，为重大进展提供了潜力，理解科学进步。这样的理解可以指导负责分配稀缺资金资源的政策制定者。这个项目调查一个领域的研究团队的组成如何影响科学进步的速度。换句话说，该项目考察了一个领域的团队组合对科学领域产生新知识的速度的影响，以产生关于科学进步性质的基本知识，并指导政策制定者试图在一系列潜在项目中分配资金。研究重点是开发两套能够捕捉领域多样性和创新性的指标。第一组指标基于对从标题和摘要中提取的短语的文本分析，并衡量创新和科学进步的速度。这些指标跟踪概念在一个领域中出现、传播和衰败的速度。第二套指标量化了一个领域中大团队和小团队的组合以及跨学科团队的多和少的组合，换言之，即领域的“生态”。这些指标的目标是在科学领域一级捕捉科学生态系统的规模和多样性。该项目将物理学、天文学和实验生物学作为测试案例，用于制定措施，并测试领域结构与随时间推移的创新速度之间的关系。

Science is organized around specific fields of inquiry that play a crucial role in the advancement of knowledge. By shifting the study of collaboration and productivity to the level of fields provides the potential for major advances understanding advances in science. Such understandings can guide policymakers tasked with allocating scarce funding resources. This project investigates how the composition of research teams in a field affects the pace of scientific advance. In other words, the project examines the impact of the mix of teams in a field on the rate at which scientific fields generate new knowledge, in order to generate fundamental knowledge on the nature of scientific advance and to guide policymakers trying to allocate funding across a portfolio of potential projects.The research focuses on the development of two sets of indicators able to capture field diversity and innovativeness. The first set of indicators is based on text analysis of phrases extracted from titles and abstracts and measures the pace of innovation and scientific advance. These indicators track the rate of concepts appearing, diffusing, and decaying in a field. The second set of indicators quantify the mix of large and small teams as well as the mix of more and less interdisciplinary teams in a field, in other words, the "ecology" of the field. The goal of the indicators is to capture the size and diversity of scientific ecosystems at the level of scientific fields. The project considers physics, astronomy and experimental biology as test cases for developing measures and testing relations between field structure and the pace of innovation over time.