CAREER: How Does Core Scientific Knowledge Advance? Understanding Team Innovation at the Foundations of Sciences

在过去的一个世纪里，科学的特点是研究的规模和复杂性急剧增加，专业化程度不断提高，从个人创新过渡到合作发现。这种转变是由对“团队科学”的高度期望推动的，团队中的科学家将实现突破，否则很难通过个人或附加的努力实现突破。然而，团队科学的基础上有两个问题需要进行彻底的调查，以免这种过高的期望演变成未兑现的承诺。首先，关于基本问题的基本、核心科学知识的进步可能会受到抑制或减缓，尽管在应对社会需求提出的紧急问题时越来越多地使用这种知识。例如，新冠肺炎疫苗的快速和成功开发取决于数十年来对信使核糖核酸机制的基础研究，但尚不清楚大流行的大量资金如何帮助信使核糖核酸研究或其他生物学上至关重要的研究。知识核心的缓慢发展可能会抑制建立在知识核心之上的研究前沿的扩展，并从长远来看影响下游的教育举措。其次，在大团队和临时科学队伍崛起的背景下，年轻科学家在团队科学时代的角色和职业已成为一个被忽视的话题。事实上，虽然之前的研究强调了团队的好处，但最近的研究揭示了团队在限制创造性思维、减少应有的信用和破坏职业发展方面的成本。总而言之，团队在知识生产中日益占据主导地位，迫切需要了解单个科学家如何在团队中学习、进步和有效创新。这个项目有三个主要目标。首先，我建议通过分析同一主题上被高度引用的论文之间的位移，使用新获得的4600万篇论文和700万个教学大纲的数据集，来理解核心科学知识在过去一个世纪的演变。其次，我将通过分析年龄构成、协作距离和资金支持对全球3500个城市200万名有歧义的科学家合作的创新绩效的影响，从知识核心调查团队创新的心理、沟通和财务状况。最后，我将调查为核心知识创新做出贡献的团队成员的职业成就，重点是职业生涯早期的女性和来自微区化群体的研究人员。使用机器学习模型，我将在1600万篇论文中识别作者的不同角色，并将这些角色与数百万份简历所揭示的工作成果联系起来。这项研究计划将对几个领域做出贡献，包括科学学、科学传播学和公共政策。制作的文献、指标、数据库和代码将有助于执业科学家、研究和资金经理以及政策制定者如何设计、支持和评估科学基础上的创新研究团队。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Science in the past century has been characterized by a dramatic increase in the scale and complexity of research, growing specialization, and a transition from individual innovation to collaborative discovery. This shift has been driven by a high expectation for “team science,” that scientists in teams will achieve breakthroughs otherwise difficult to attain through individual or additive efforts. Yet, two problems at the foundation of team science call for a thorough investigation lest this high expectation devolves into underdelivered promise. First, the advance of basic, core scientific knowledge on fundamental questions can be stifled or slowed despite the increased use of this knowledge in responding to urgent questions raised by societal needs. For example, the fast and successful development of the COVID-19 vaccine is conditional on decades of basic research on mRNA mechanisms, but it is unclear how a flood of pandemic funding has helped mRNA studies or other research of fundamental importance in biology. The slow development of the knowledge core may restrain the expansion of the research frontier that builds upon it and affect downstream educational initiatives in the long run. Second, the roles and careers of young scientists in the era of team science have become an overlooked topic against the rise of large teams and a temporary scientific workforce. Indeed, while previous studies emphasized the benefits of teams, recent studies have revealed the cost of teams in constraining creative thinking, curtailing due credit, and undermining career progression. Taken together, the increasing dominance of teams in knowledge production presents an urgent need to understand how individual scientists can learn, progress, and effectively innovate in teams.This project has three primary objectives. First, I propose understanding the evolution of core scientific knowledge over the past century by analyzing the displacement between highly cited papers on the same topic, using newly available datasets of 46 million papers and 7 million syllabi. Second, I will investigate the psychological, communication, and financial conditions of team innovation at the knowledge core, by analyzing the impact of age composition, collaboration distance, and funding support on the innovative performance of 2 million name-disambiguated scientists collaborating across 3,500 cities around the globe. Finally, I will investigate the career outcomes of team members who contributed to core knowledge innovation, focusing on early-career women and researchers from minoritized groups. Using machine learning models, I will identify the distinct roles of authors across 16 million papers and associate these roles with job outcomes revealed by millions of CVs. This research program will contribute to several fields, including the science of science, science communication, and public policy. The produced literature, metrics, databases, and code will benefit practicing scientists, research and funding managers, and policymakers on how to design, support, and evaluate research teams for innovation at the foundations of sciences.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.