Related papers: Money, Time, and Grant Design
In the context of scientific policy and science management, this study examines the system of nonuniform wage distribution for researchers. A nonlinear mathematical model of optimal remuneration for scientific workers has been developed,…
Tenure is a cornerstone of the US academic system, yet its relationship to faculty research trajectories remains poorly understood. Conceptually, tenure systems may act as a selection mechanism, screening in high-output researchers; a…
The impact of large language models (LLMs) on critical thinking has provoked growing attention, yet this impact on actual performance may not be uniformly negative or positive. Particularly, the role of time -- the temporal context under…
Using the results of the UK's research assessment exercise, we show that the size or mass of research groups, rather than individual caliber or prestige of the institution, is the dominant factor which drives the quality of research teams.…
There is a movement in design of experiments away from the classic randomization put forward by Fisher, Cochran and others to one based on optimization. In fixed-sample trials comparing two groups, measurements of subjects are known in…
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…
Inter-disciplinary research (IDR) is being promoted by federal agencies and universities nationwide because it presumably spurs transformative, innovative science. In this paper we bring empirical data to assess whether IDR is indeed…
Experiments deliver credible treatment-effect estimates but, because they are costly, are often restricted to specific sites, small populations, or particular mechanisms. A common practice across several fields is therefore to combine…
This position paper argues that decisions on processes, tools, techniques and software artifacts (such as user manuals, unit tests, design documents and code) for scientific software development should be driven by science, not by personal…
How are the merits of innovative ideas communicated in science? Here we conduct semantic analyses of grant application success with a focus on scientific promotional language, which has been growing in frequency in many contexts and…
AI has revolutionised decision-making across various fields. Yet human judgement remains paramount for high-stakes decision-making. This has fueled explorations of collaborative decision-making between humans and AI systems, aiming to…
In recent years there has been an increasingly pressing need for the evaluation of results from public sector research activity, particularly to permit the efficient allocation of ever scarcer resources. Many of the studies and evaluation…
Recent trends in test-time scaling for reasoning models (e.g., OpenAI o1, DeepSeek R1) have led to a popular belief that extending thinking traces using prompts like "Wait" or "Let me rethink" can improve performance. This raises a natural…
We examine the innovation of researchers with long-lived careers in Computer Science and Physics. Despite the epistemological differences between such disciplines, we consistently find that a researcher's most innovative publication occurs…
Mixed-effect models are flexible tools for researchers in a myriad of fields, but that flexibility comes at the cost of complexity and if users are not careful in how their model is specified, they could be making faulty inferences from…
The last few years have seen the proliferation of measures that quantify the scientific output of researches. Yet, these measures focus on productivity, thus fostering the "publish or perish" paradigm. This article proposes a measure that…
What factors affect a scientist's choice of research problem? Qualitative research in the history, philosophy, and sociology of science suggests that this choice is shaped by an "essential tension" between the professional demand for…
Are the sciences not advancing at an ever increasing speed? We contrast this popular perspective with the view that science funding may actually see diminishing returns, at least regarding established fields. In order to stimulate a larger…
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…
This study on public-private research collaboration measures the variation over time of the propensity of academics to collaborate with colleagues from private companies. It also investigates the change in weights of the main drivers…