Inequality in Global Scientific Research: Implications for Novelty and Innovation

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Researchers collaborate across national borders, scientists move abroad to further their careers, and new discoveries are widely disseminated via journals and conferences that are increasingly international in scope and locale. The presumption held by policy makers and scientists is that globalization benefits research and enhances knowledge production, especially for researchers in countries with fewer resources. There is extensive research to suggest that diversity of experiences and perspectives in scientists, specifically in multidisciplinary collaborations, tends to yield better solutions in openly collaborative problem-solving ventures. However, researchers may prematurely coalesce on readily available, but perhaps suboptimal, solutions to their work, as scientific knowledge—whether embodied by peer-reviewed journals or global interpersonal networks—is more readily accessible in high volume and on demand. Amplifying the influence of readily available knowledge is that only a few countries are able to garner the resources needed to sustain cutting-edge scientific research. Those countries that do may increasingly influence what is topically important and implicitly set the agenda for scientific fields, potentially homogenizing scientific discourse and stifling innovation. This project aims to improve the rate of socially beneficial scientific discovery by developing methods, indicators, and analytic approaches that identify fields that may be less novel over time due to homogenization, as well as countries that lag behind their peers. This project will model scientific influence and novelty on a global level using innovative analysis tools that integrate natural language processing and social network analysis. Natural language processing uncovers influence and knowledge contained in the medium of science at scale (i.e., the text found in academic publications), while social network analysis structurally traces this influence between countries and over time. The project has five key objectives: to 1) create international networks of influence across diverse fields using the abstracts of scientific publications, 2) apply network-based measures of inequality to these networks to demonstrate trends over time in different fields and countries, 3) apply novelty scores to countries in each of these fields, 4) relate measures of growing inequality in international influence networks to novelty scores, and 5) identify the fields and countries where this inequality in influence and the rising or waning novelty is the most and least severe. The project’s guiding hypothesis is that across a range of scientific fields, influence increasingly originates from a smaller sect of highly developed countries. Their unequal influence on science performed in other countries results in a homogenization of what is researched around the world in many fields. As influence in a field is increasingly concentrated and research topics become increasingly similar across borders, the global novelty of ideas declines.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.