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Register a new userAssessing Researcher Interdisciplinarity: A Case Study of the University of Hawaii NASA Astrobiology Institute
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In this study, we combine bibliometric techniques with a machine learning algorithm, the sequential Information Bottleneck, to assess the interdisciplinarity of research produced by the University of Hawaii NASA Astrobiology Institute (UHNAI). In particular, we cluster abstract data to evaluate Thomson Reuters Web of Knowledge subject categories as descriptive labels for astrobiology documents, assess individual researcher interdisciplinarity, and determine where collaboration opportunities might occur. We find that the majority of the UHNAI team is engaged in interdisciplinary research, and suggest that our method could be applied to additional NASA Astrobiology Institute teams in particular, or other interdisciplinary research teams more broadly, to identify and facilitate collaboration opportunities.
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A comparative study is done of interdisciplinary citations in 2013 between physics, chemistry, and molecular biology, in Brazil, South Korea, Turkey, and USA. Several surprising conclusions emerge from our tabular and graphical analysis: The cross-science citation rates are in general strikingly similar, between Brazil, South Korea, Turkey, and USA. One apparent exception is the comparatively more tenuous relation between molecular biology and physics in Brazil and USA. Other slight exceptions are the higher amount of citing of physicists by chemists in South Korea, of chemists by molecular biologists in Turkey, and of molecular biologists by chemists in Brazil and USA. Chemists are, by a sizable margin, the most cross-science citing scientists in this group of three sciences. Physicist are, again by a sizable margin, the least cross-science citing scientists in this group of three sciences. In all four countries, the strongest cross-science citation is from chemistry to physics and the weakest cross-science citation is from physics to molecular biology. Our findings are consistent with a V-shaped backbone connectivity, as opposed to a Delta connectivity, as also found in a previous study of earlier citation years.
Using a large database (~ 215 000 records) of relevant articles, we empirically study the complex systems field and its claims to find universal principles applying to systems in general. The study of references shared by the papers allows us to obtain a global point of view on the structure of this highly interdisciplinary field. We show that its overall coherence does not arise from a universal theory but instead from computational techniques and fruitful adaptations of the idea of self-organization to specific systems. We also find that communication between different disciplines goes through specific trading zones, ie sub-communities that create an interface around specific tools (a DNA microchip) or concepts (a network).
Although interdisciplinarity is often touted as a necessity for modern research, the evidence on the relative impact of sectorial versus to interdisciplinary science is qualitative at best. In this paper we leverage the bibliographic data set of the American Physical Society to quantify the role of interdisciplinarity in physics, and that of talent and luck in achieving success in scientific careers. We analyze a period of 30 years (1980-2009) tagging papers and their authors by means of the Physics and Astronomy Classification Scheme (PACS), to show that some degree of interdisciplinarity is quite helpful to reach success, measured as a proxy of either the number of articles or the citations score. We also propose an agent-based model of the publication-reputation-citation dynamics reproduces the trends observed in the APS data set. On the one hand, the results highlight the crucial role of randomness and serendipity in real scientific research; on the other, they shed light on a counter-intuitive effect indicating that the most talented authors are not necessarily the most successful ones.
Analyzing a large data set of publications drawn from the most competitive journals in the natural and social sciences we show that research careers exhibit the broad distributions of individual achievement characteristic of systems in which cumulative advantage plays a key role. While most researchers are personally aware of the competition implicit in the publication process, little is known about the levels of inequality at the level of individual researchers. We analyzed both productivity and impact measures for a large set of researchers publishing in high-impact journals. For each researcher cohort we calculated Gini inequality coefficients, with average Gini values around 0.48 for total publications and 0.73 for total citations. For perspective, these observed values are well in excess of the inequality levels observed for personal income in developing countries. Investigating possible sources of this inequality, we identify two potential mechanisms that act at the level of the individual that may play defining roles in the emergence of the broad productivity and impact distributions found in science. First, we show that the average time interval between a researchers successive publications in top journals decreases with each subsequent publication. Second, after controlling for the time dependent features of citation distributions, we compare the citation impact of subsequent publications within a researchers publication record. We find that as researchers continue to publish in top journals, there is more likely to be a decreasing trend in the relative citation impact with each subsequent publication. This pattern highlights the difficulty of repeatedly publishing high-impact research and the intriguing possibility that confirmation bias plays a role in the evaluation of scientific careers.
The University of Hawaii Wide-Field Imager (UHWFI) is a focal compressor system designed to project the full half-degree field of the UH 2.2 m telescope onto the refurbished UH 8Kx8K CCD camera. The optics use Ohara glasses and are mounted in an oil-filled cell to minimize light losses and ghost images from the large number of internal lens surfaces. The UHWFI is equipped with a six-position filter wheel and a rotating sector blade shutter,both driven by stepper motors. The instrument saw first light in 2004 in an engineering mode. After filling the lens cell with index matching oil, integration of all software components into the user interface, tuning of the CCD performance, and the purchase of the final filter set, UHWFI is now fully commissioned at the UH 2.2 m telescope.
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