Related papers: Serendipity in Science
Open Science has been a rising theme in the landscape of science policy in recent years. The goal is to make research that emerges from publicly funded science to become findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable (FAIR) for use by…
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…
Scientists pursue collective knowledge, but they also seek personal recognition from their peers. When scientists decide whether or not to work on a big new problem, they weigh the potential rewards of a major discovery against the costs of…
An academic scientist's professional success depends on publishing. Publishing norms emphasize novel, positive results. As such, disciplinary incentives encourage design, analysis, and reporting decisions that elicit positive results and…
Preprints have become increasingly essential in the landscape of open science, facilitating not only the exchange of knowledge within the scientific community but also bridging the gap between science and technology. However, the impact of…
In this work we dig into the process of scientific discovery by looking at a yet unexploited source of information: Polymath projects. Polymath projects are an original attempt to collectively solve mathematical problems in an online…
Inspired by the social and economic benefits of diversity, we analyze over 9 million papers and 6 million scientists to study the relationship between research impact and five classes of diversity: ethnicity, discipline, gender,…
Computer science research has led to many breakthrough innovations but has also been scrutinized for enabling technology that has negative, unintended consequences for society. Given the increasing discussions of ethics in the news and…
Scientific publications enable results and ideas to be transmitted throughout the scientific community. The number and type of journal publications also have become the primary criteria used in evaluating career advancement. Our analysis…
Some scientists are more likely to explore unfamiliar research topics while others tend to exploit existing ones. In previous work, correlations have been found between scientists' topic choices and their career performances. However,…
Science is becoming increasingly more interdisciplinary, giving rise to more diversity in the areas of expertise within research labs and groups. This also have brought changes to the role researchers in scientific works. As a consequence,…
Scientific prizes are among the greatest recognition a scientist receives from their peers and arguably shape the direction of a field by conferring credibility to persons, ideas, and disciplines, providing financial rewards, and promoting…
The rapid rise of international collaboration over the past three decades, demonstrated in coauthorship of scientific articles, raises the question of whether countries benefit from cooperative science and how this might be measured. We…
Persistence is often regarded as a virtue in science. In this paper, however, we challenge this conventional view by highlighting its contextual nature, particularly how persistence can become a liability during periods of paradigm shift.…
Scholarly publications represent at least two benefits for the study of the scientific community as a social group. First, they attest of some form of relation between scientists (collaborations, mentoring, heritage,...), useful to…
Scientific knowledge has become central to policymaking as societies face challenges related to technological change, climate risk, and public health. Despite the growing emphasis on evidence-based policy, a systematic understanding of how…
The exponentially growing number of scientific papers stimulates a discussion on the interplay between quantity and quality in science. In particular, one may wonder which publication strategy may offer more chances of success: publishing…
Faculty at prestigious institutions dominate scientific discourse, with the small proportion of researchers at elite universities producing a disproportionate share of all research publications. Environmental prestige is known to drive such…
Emergent patterns of collective attention towards scientists and their research may function as a proxy for scientific impact which traditionally is assessed via committees that award prizes to scientists. Therefore it is crucial to…
Citations are commonly held to represent scientific impact. To date, however, there is no empirical evidence in support of this postulate that is central to research assessment exercises and Science of Science studies. Here, we report on…