Related papers: Rationalizing risk aversion in science
Consistent confirmations obtained independently of each other lend credibility to a scientific result. We refer to results satisfying this consistency as reproducible and assume that reproducibility is a desirable property of scientific…
Investments in research and development are key to scientific and economic growth and to the well-being of society. Scientific research demands significant resources making national scientific investment a crucial driver of scientific…
The core of scientific research is turning new ideas into reality. From the school science fair to the search for the secrets of dark energy, high-quality research consists of scientific investigation constrained within the scope of a…
Sir, We write as senior scientists about a problem vital to the scientific enterprise and prosperity. Nowadays, funding is a lengthy and complex business. First, universities themselves must approve all proposals for submission. Funding…
We develop a method to estimate producers' productivity beliefs when output quantities and input prices are unobservable, and we use it to evaluate the market for science. Our model of researchers' labor supply shows how their willingness…
Reward schemes may affect not only agents' effort, but also their incentives to gather information to reduce the riskiness of the productive activity. In a laboratory experiment using a novel task, we find that the relationship between…
The incidence of extramural collaboration in academic research activities is increasing as a result of various factors. These factors include policy measures aimed at fostering partnership and networking among the various components of the…
Why do firms produce scientific research and make it available to the public, including their rivals? Prior literature has emphasized the tension between imitation risks from disclosure and scientists' preferences for publication. This…
Research projects are primarily collaborative in nature through internal and external partnerships, but what role does funding play in their formation? Here, we examined over 43,000 funded projects in the past three decades, enabling us to…
Scientific and technological progress has historically been very beneficial to humanity but this does not always need to be true. Going forward, science may enable bad actors to cause genetically engineered pandemics that are more frequent…
Contemporary scientific research is a distributed, collaborative endeavor, carried out by teams of researchers, regulatory institutions, funding agencies, commercial partners, and scientific bodies, all interacting with each other and…
Several systematic studies have suggested that a large fraction of published research is not reproducible. One probable reason for low reproducibility is insufficient sample size, resulting in low power and low positive predictive value. It…
Research funding systems are not isolated systems - they are embedded in a larger scientific system with an enormous influence on the system. This paper aims to analyze the allocation of competitive research funding from different…
Cooperation is a key driver of human social progress. Studies of the evolution of cooperation typically assume a deterministic outcome for social interactions. But in real-world social interactions, interaction outcomes are often subject to…
Research has become increasingly reliant on software, serving as the driving force behind bioinformatics, high performance computing, physics, machine learning and artificial intelligence, to name a few. While substantial progress has been…
We explore a paradox of collective action and certainty in science wherein the more scientists research together, the less that work contributes to the value of their collective certainty. When scientists address similar problems and share…
Small to medium-scale data science experiments often rely on research software developed ad-hoc by individual scientists or small teams. Often there is no time to make the research software fast, reusable, and open access. The consequence…
In scientific research, collaboration is one of the most effective ways to take advantage of new ideas, skills, resources, and for performing interdisciplinary research. Although collaboration networks have been intensively studied, the…
The explosive growth of scientists, scientific journals, articles and findings in recent years exponentially increases the difficulty scientists face in navigating prior knowledge. This challenge is exacerbated by uncertainty about the…
In software-engineering research, many empirical studies are conducted with open-source or industry developers. However, in contrast to other research communities like economics or psychology, only few experiments use financial incentives…