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

在过去的世纪，科学的特点是研究的规模和复杂性急剧增加，日益专业化，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，即团队中的科学家将取得突破，否则很难通过个人或累加的努力实现。然而，团队科学的两个基础问题需要进行彻底的调查，以免这种高期望变成兑现不了的承诺。第一，尽管在应对社会需求所提出的紧迫问题时越来越多地使用了关于基本问题的基本核心科学知识，但这种知识的进步可能会受到抑制或减缓。例如，COVID-19疫苗的快速和成功开发取决于数十年来对mRNA机制的基础研究，但目前尚不清楚大量流行病资金如何帮助mRNA研究或其他生物学中具有根本重要性的研究。知识核心的缓慢发展可能会限制以其为基础的研究前沿的扩展，并从长远来看影响下游的教育举措。第二，在团队科学时代，年轻科学家的角色和职业已经成为一个被忽视的话题，而不是大型团队和临时科学工作者的崛起。事实上，虽然以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，减少应有的信贷和破坏职业发展方面的成本。总之，团队在知识生产中的主导地位日益增强，迫切需要了解科学家个人如何在团队中学习、进步和有效创新。首先，我建议通过分析同一主题的高被引论文之间的位移来理解核心科学知识在过去世纪的演变，使用新获得的4600万篇论文和700万份教学大纲的数据集。其次，我将通过分析年龄构成、合作距离和资金支持对地球仪上3,500个城市的200万名科学家的创新绩效的影响，调查以知识为核心的团队创新的心理、沟通和财务状况。最后，我将调查的团队成员谁有助于核心知识创新的职业成果，重点是职业生涯早期的妇女和研究人员从少数群体。使用机器学习模型，我将识别1600万篇论文中作者的不同角色，并将这些角色与数百万份简历所揭示的工作成果相关联。该研究计划将有助于几个领域，包括科学，科学传播和公共政策的科学。所产生的文献、指标、数据库和代码将使实践科学家、研究和资金管理者以及政策制定者在如何设计、支持和评估研究团队以促进科学基础的创新方面受益。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并被认为值得通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估来支持。

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.