Being Together in Place as a Catalyst for Scientific Advance

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Duede, Eamon, Teplitskiy, Misha, Lakhani, Karim, Evans, James
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2021
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author Duede, Eamon
Teplitskiy, Misha
Lakhani, Karim
Evans, James
author_facet Duede, Eamon
Teplitskiy, Misha
Lakhani, Karim
Evans, James
contents The COVID-19 pandemic necessitated social distancing at every level of society, including universities and research institutes, raising essential questions concerning the continuing importance of physical proximity for scientific and scholarly advance. Using customized author surveys about the intellectual influence of referenced work on scientists' own papers, combined with precise measures of geographical and semantic distance between focal and referenced works, we find that being at the same institution is strongly associated with intellectual influence on scientists' and scholars' published work. However, this influence increases with intellectual distance: the more different the referenced work done by colleagues at one's institution, the more influential it is on one's own. Universities worldwide constitute places where people doing very different work engage in sustained interactions through departments, committees, seminars, and communities. These interactions come to uniquely influence their published research, suggesting the need to replace rather than displace diverse engagements for sustainable advance.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2107_04165
institution arXiv
publishDate 2021
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Being Together in Place as a Catalyst for Scientific Advance
Duede, Eamon
Teplitskiy, Misha
Lakhani, Karim
Evans, James
Digital Libraries
Social and Information Networks
The COVID-19 pandemic necessitated social distancing at every level of society, including universities and research institutes, raising essential questions concerning the continuing importance of physical proximity for scientific and scholarly advance. Using customized author surveys about the intellectual influence of referenced work on scientists' own papers, combined with precise measures of geographical and semantic distance between focal and referenced works, we find that being at the same institution is strongly associated with intellectual influence on scientists' and scholars' published work. However, this influence increases with intellectual distance: the more different the referenced work done by colleagues at one's institution, the more influential it is on one's own. Universities worldwide constitute places where people doing very different work engage in sustained interactions through departments, committees, seminars, and communities. These interactions come to uniquely influence their published research, suggesting the need to replace rather than displace diverse engagements for sustainable advance.
title Being Together in Place as a Catalyst for Scientific Advance
topic Digital Libraries
Social and Information Networks
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.04165