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Register a new userThe emergent integrated network structure of scientific research
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The practice of scientific research is often thought of as individuals and small teams striving for disciplinary advances. Yet as a whole, this endeavor more closely resembles a complex system of natural computation, in which information is obtained, generated, and disseminated more effectively than would be possible by individuals acting in isolation. Currently, the structure of this integrated and innovative landscape of scientific ideas is not well understood. Here we use tools from network science to map the landscape of interconnected research topics covered in the multidisciplinary journal PNAS since 2000. We construct networks in which nodes represent topics of study and edges give the degree to which topics occur in the same papers. The network displays small-world architecture, with dense connectivity within scientific clusters and sparse connectivity between clusters. Notably, clusters tend not to align with assigned article classifications, but instead contain topics from various disciplines. Using a temporal graph, we find that small-worldness has increased over time, suggesting growing efficiency and integration of ideas. Finally, we define a novel measure of interdisciplinarity, which is positively associated with PNASs impact factor. Broadly, this work suggests that complex and dynamic patterns of knowledge emerge from scientific research, and that structures reflecting intellectual integration may be beneficial for obtaining scientific insight.
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As the field of neuroimaging grows, it can be difficult for scientists within the field to gain and maintain a detailed understanding of its ever-changing landscape. While collaboration and citation networks highlight important contributions within the field, the roles of and relations among specific areas of study can remain quite opaque. Here, we apply techniques from network science to map the landscape of neuroimaging research documented in the journal NeuroImage over the past decade. We create a network in which nodes represent research topics, and edges give the degree to which these topics tend to be covered in tandem. The network displays small-world architecture, with communities characterized by common imaging modalities and medical applications, and with bridges that integrate these distinct subfields. Using node-level analysis, we quantify the structural roles of individual topics within the neuroimaging landscape, and find high levels of clustering within the structural MRI subfield as well as increasing participation among topics related to psychiatry. The overall prevalence of a topic is unrelated to the prevalence of its neighbors, but the degree to which a topic becomes more or less popular over time is strongly related to changes in the prevalence of its neighbors. Broadly, this work presents a cohesive model for understanding the landscape of neuroimaging research across the field, in broad subfields, and within specific topic areas.
The structure of communication networks is an important determinant of the capacity of teams, organizations and societies to solve policy, business and science problems. Yet, previous studies reached contradictory results about the relationship between network structure and performance, finding support for the superiority of both well-connected efficient and poorly connected inefficient network structures. Here we argue that understanding how communication networks affect group performance requires taking into consideration the social learning strategies of individual team members. We show that efficient networks outperform inefficient networks when individuals rely on conformity by copying the most frequent solution among their contacts. However, inefficient networks are superior when individuals follow the best member by copying the group member with the highest payoff. In addition, groups relying on conformity based on a small sample of others excel at complex tasks, while groups following the best member achieve greatest performance for simple tasks. Our findings reconcile contradictory results in the literature and have broad implications for the study of social learning across disciplines.
Science is considered essential to innovation and economic prosperity. Understanding how nations build scientific capacity is therefore crucial to promote economic growth and national development. Although studies have shown that national scientific development is affected by geographic, historic, and economic factors, it remains unclear whether there are universal structures and trajectories behind national scientific development that can inform forecasting and policy making. By examining countries scientific exportation-the publications that are internationally indexed-we reveal a three-cluster structure in the relatedness network of disciplines that underpin national scientific development and the organization of global science. Tracing the evolution of national research portfolios reveals that while nations are proceeding to more diverse research profiles individually, scientific production is increasingly specialized in global science over the past decades. We further demonstrate that the revealed disciplinary clusters inform economic development, where the number of publications in applied research centered cluster significantly predicts economic growth. By uncovering the underlying structure of scientific development and connecting it with economic development, our results may offer a new perspective to study national scientific development and its relationships with economic development.
Research grants have played an important role in seeding and promoting fundamental research projects worldwide. There is a growing demand for developing and delivering scientific influence analysis as a service on research grant repositories. Such analysis can provide insight on how research grants help foster new research collaborations, encourage cross-organizational collaborations, influence new research trends, and identify technical leadership. This paper presents the design and development of a grants-based scientific influence analysis service, coined as GImpact. It takes a graph-theoretic approach to design and develop large scale scientific influence analysis over a large research-grant repository with three original contributions. First, we mine the grant database to identify and extract important features for grants influence analysis and represent such features using graph theoretic models. For example, we extract an institution graph and multiple associated aspect-based collaboration graphs, including a discipline graph and a keyword graph. Second, we introduce self-influence and co-influence algorithms to compute two types of collaboration relationship scores based on the number of grants and the types of grants for institutions. We compute the self-influence scores to reflect the grant based research collaborations among institutions and compute multiple co-influence scores to model the various types of cross-institution collaboration relationships in terms of disciplines and subject areas. Third, we compute the overall scientific influence score for every pair of institutions by introducing a weighted sum of the self-influence score and the multiple co-influence scores and conduct an influence-based clustering analysis. We evaluate GImpact using a real grant database, consisting of 2512 institutions and their grants received over a period of 14 years...
We describe our framework, deployed at Facebook, that accounts for interference between experimental units through cluster-randomized experiments. We document this system, including the design and estimation procedures, and detail insights we have gained from the many experiments that have used this system at scale. We introduce a cluster-based regression adjustment that substantially improves precision for estimating global treatment effects as well as testing for interference as part of our estimation procedure. With this regression adjustment, we find that imbalanced clusters can better account for interference than balanced clusters without sacrificing accuracy. In addition, we show how logging exposure to a treatment can be used for additional variance reduction. Interference is a widely acknowledged issue with online field experiments, yet there is less evidence from real-world experiments demonstrating interference in online settings. We fill this gap by describing two case studies that capture significant network effects and highlight the value of this experimentation framework.
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