Related papers: Serendipity in Science
Communicating new scientific discoveries is key to human progress. Yet, this endeavor is hindered by monetary restrictions for publishing one's findings and accessing other scientists' reports. This process is further exacerbated by a large…
New ideas are often thought to arise from recombining existing knowledge. Yet despite rapid publication growth - and expanding opportunities for recombination - scientific breakthroughs remain rare. This gap between productivity and…
For many students, introductory college science courses are often the only opportunity in their formal higher education to be exposed to science, shaping their view of the subject, their scientific literacy, and their attitudes towards…
We address the question to what extent the success of scientific articles is due to social influence. Analyzing a data set of over 100000 publications from the field of Computer Science, we study how centrality in the coauthorship network…
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…
Despite persistent efforts in revealing the temporal patterns in scientific careers, little attention has been paid to the spatial patterns of scientific activities in the knowledge space. Here, drawing on millions of papers in six…
The past half-century has seen a dramatic increase in the scale and complexity of scientific research, to which researchers have responded by dedicating more time to education and training, narrowing their areas of specialization, and…
Poor research design and data analysis encourage false-positive findings. Such poor methods persist despite perennial calls for improvement, suggesting that they result from something more than just misunderstanding. The persistence of poor…
This study examines a fundamental yet overlooked function of peer review: its role in exposing reviewers to new and unexpected ideas. Leveraging a natural experiment involving over half a million peer review invitations covering both…
Understanding the heterogeneity of mechanisms that form public attitudes towards science and technology policymaking is essential to the establishment of an effective public engagement platform. Using the 2011 public opinion survey data…
This paper investigates the effects of seeing ideas presented in-person when they are easily accessible online. Presentations may increase the diffusion of ideas intentionally (when one attends the presentation of an idea of interest) and…
Interdisciplinary collaborations now sweep most fields of the natural and life sciences, necessary to tackle the world's most challenging problems. Yet, the scientific enterprise continues to be dominated by old stereotypes:…
It has long been known that scientific output proceeds on an exponential increase, or more properly, a logistic growth curve. The interplay between effort and discovery is clear, and the nature of the functional form has been thought to be…
Prior work finds a diversity paradox: diversity breeds innovation, and yet, underrepresented groups that diversify organizations have less successful careers within them. Does the diversity paradox hold for scientists as well? We study this…
Participants in socio-economic systems are often ranked based on their performance. Rankings conveniently reduce the complexity of such systems to ordered lists. Yet, it has been shown in many contexts that those who reach the top are not…
Do highly productive researchers have significantly higher probability to produce top cited papers? Or does the increased productivity in science only result in a sea of irrelevant papers as a perverse effect of competition and the…
Do different fields of knowledge require different research strategies? A numerical model exploring different virtual knowledge landscapes, revealed two diverging optimal search strategies. Trend following is maximized when the popularity…
Keeping up with the research literature plays an important role in the workflow of scientists - allowing them to understand a field, formulate the problems they focus on, and develop the solutions that they contribute, which in turn shape…
There is demand from science funders, industry, and the public that science should become more risk-taking, more out-of-the-box, and more interdisciplinary. Is it possible to tell how interdisciplinary and out-of-the-box scientific papers…
Mentorship in science is crucial for topic choice, career decisions, and the success of mentees and mentors. Typically, researchers who study mentorship use article co-authorship and doctoral dissertation datasets. However, available…