Interdisciplinary research has consistently lower funding success

Machine learning misclassification networks reveal a citation advantage of interdisciplinary publications only in high-impact journals

Given a large enough volume of data and precise, meaningful categories, training a statistical model to solve a classification problem is straightforward and has become a standard application of machine learning (ML). If the categories are not precise, but rather fuzzy, as in the case of scientific disciplines, the systematic failures of ML classification can be informative about properties of the underlying categories. Here we classify a large volume of academic publications using only the abstract as information. From the publications that are classified differently by journal categories and ML categories (i.e., misclassified publications, when using the journal assignment as ground truth) we construct a network among disciplines. Analysis of these misclassifications provides insight in two topics at the core of the science of science: (1) Mapping out the interplay of disciplines. We show that this misclassification network is informative about the interplay of academic disciplines and it is similar to, but distinct from, a citation-based map of science, where nodes are scientific disciplines and an edge indicates a strong co-citation count between publications in these disciplines. (2) Analyzing the success of interdisciplinarity. By evaluating the citation patterns of publications, we show that misclassification can be linked to interdisciplinarity and, furthermore, that misclassified articles have different citation frequencies than correctly classified articles: In the highest 10 percent of journals in each discipline, these misclassified articles are on average cited more frequently, while in the rest of the journals they are cited less frequently.

Competing for research funding: Key elements impacting the evaluation of grant proposal

As funding is one of the key pillars of research activity, identifying the factors that impact the evaluation results in research funding competitions remains challenging, due to the heterogeneity of funding instruments. In this context, our study aims to identify the elements that ensure the application's success, comparing two perspectives: one of the applicant and the other based on the evaluation grid. The empirical investigation focuses on a survey of 243 Romanian researchers. As analysis methods, we use a binary logistic regression model to correlate the success in funding competitions for research projects with a set of factors considered determinants. The results show that the researcher's past performance influences the proposal's future performance/success, with the quality of the project director's previous publications, and its international visibility being the key drivers of successful research project applications.

Slow convergence: Career impediments to interdisciplinary biomedical research

Despite the long-standing calls for increased levels of interdisciplinary research as a way to address society's grand challenges, most science is still disciplinary. To understand the slow rate of convergence to more interdisciplinary research, we examine 154,021 researchers who received a PhD in a biomedical field between 1970 and 2013, measuring the interdisciplinarity of their articles using the disciplinary composition of references. We provide a range of evidence that interdisciplinary research is impactful, but that those who conduct it face early career impediments. The researchers who are initially the most interdisciplinary tend to stop publishing earlier in their careers-it takes about 8 y for half of the researchers in the top percentile in terms of initial interdisciplinarity to stop publishing, compared to more than 20 y for moderately interdisciplinary researchers (10th to 75th percentiles). Moreover, perhaps in response to career challenges, initially interdisciplinary researchers on average decrease their interdisciplinarity over time. These forces reduce the stock of interdisciplinary researchers who can train future cohorts. Indeed, new graduates tend to be less interdisciplinary than the stock of active researchers. We show that interdisciplinarity does increase over time despite these dampening forces because initially disciplinary researchers become more interdisciplinary as their careers progress.

Seven recommendations for scientists, universities, and funders to embrace interdisciplinarity : Practical guidelines to enabling interdisciplinarity

Successful interdisciplinary research requires proactive efforts by researchers, institutions, funders, and publishers. This article offers practical recommendations at each decision-making level to holistically enhance interdisciplinarity.

Assessing climate change and health provisions among staff in higher education institutions: A preliminary investigation

Climate change can have direct and indirect effects on human health. Direct effects can include an increase in extreme weather events, such as heatwaves and floods, as well as an increase in the spread of vector-borne and infectious diseases, which may lead to a set of health problems and diseases. Indirect effects can include changes in air quality, water availability, and food production and distribution. These changes can lead to an increase in respiratory problems, malnutrition, and increased food insecurity. There is a perceived need to investigate the extent to which Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) are engaged in efforts to foster a greater understanding of the connections between climate change and health. In this context, this preliminary investigation offers an overview of the relationships between climate change and health. By means of a survey among teaching staff and researchers at HEIs from 42 countries across all continents working on the connection between climate change and health. The study has investigated the extent to which current provisions for education and training on the connection between climate change and health are being considered and how current needs in terms of policy development, research, and training are being met. A series of case studies illustrate how universities worldwide are actively developing strategies and implementing measures to address climate change and health. The study concludes by providing specific recommendations aimed at facilitating the handling of issues related to climate change and health in a higher education context.

An overview and comprehensive analysis of interdisciplinary clinical research in endometriosis based on trial registry

Endometriosis is a chronic multisystem disease associated with immunological, genetic, hormonal, psychological, and neuroscientific factors, leading to a significant socioeconomic impact worldwide. Though multidisciplinary management is the ideal approach, there remains a scarcity of published interdisciplinary clinical trials at present. Here, we have conducted a comprehensive analysis of the characteristics and issues of interdisciplinary trials on endometriosis based on the clinical registration database ClinicalTrials.gov. Among all 387 endometriosis trials, 30% (116) were identified as interdisciplinary, mostly conducted in Europe and North America, and fully funded by non-industrial sources. We documented growth in both patient-centered multidisciplinary comprehensive management and collaboration between fundamental biomedical science and applied medicine. However, compared to traditional obstetric-gynecological trials, interdisciplinary studies exhibited negative characteristics such as less likely to be randomized and less likely to report results. Our study provides insights for future trial investigators and may contribute to fostering greater collaboration in medical research.

Ensuring the affordable becomes accessible-lessons from ketamine, a new treatment for severe depression

In this paper, the case study of ketamine as a new treatment for severe depression is used to outline the challenges of repurposing established medicines and we suggest potential solutions. The antidepressant effects of generic racemic ketamine were identified over 20 years ago, but there were insufficient incentives for commercial entities to pursue its registration, or support for non-commercial entities to fill this gap. As a result, the evaluation of generic ketamine was delayed, piecemeal, uncoordinated, and insufficient to gain approval. Meanwhile, substantial commercial investment enabled the widespread registration of a patented, intranasal s-enantiomeric ketamine formulation (Spravato®) for depression. However, Spravato is priced at $600-$900/dose compared to ~$5/dose for generic ketamine, and the ~AUD$100 million annual government investment requested in Australia (to cover drug costs alone) has been rejected twice, leaving this treatment largely inaccessible for Australian patients 2 years after Therapeutic Goods Administration approval. Moreover, emerging evidence indicates that generic racemic ketamine is at least as effective as Spravato, but no comparative trials were required for regulatory approval and have not been conducted. Without action, this story will repeat regularly in the next decade with a new wave of psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy treatments, for which the original off-patent molecules could be available at low-cost and reduce the overall cost of treatment. Several systemic reforms are required to ensure that affordable, effective options become accessible; these include commercial incentives, public and public-private funding schemes, reduced regulatory barriers and more coordinated international public funding schemes to support translational research.

An Evolving Understanding of Sense of Place in Social-Ecological Systems Research and the Barriers and Enablers to its Measurement

Social-ecological systems (SES) are changing more in the Anthropocene than ever before. With this also comes a change in Sense of Place (SoP), that is, the emotional bond that a person (or group of people) has with a place. This impacts how individuals and groups interact with a place (i.e., their behaviours) and respond to disturbance or change (i.e., their adaptive capacity). To understand how SoP is changing across space and time and to be able to compare this across social-ecological contexts, we must first take stock of how SoP is conceptualised so as to understand how to capture and measure the phenomena in a meaningful way (e.g., to inform policy). Based on in-depth qualitative interviews with leading SoP researchers (n = 17 from 8 countries) this paper aims to identify: (1) the current breadth of theoretical conceptualisations for SoP; (2) the methodologies that have been used to measure SoP in different contexts and settings; and (3) the barriers and (4) enablers to the use of different methodologies. Results show that there has been a change in how SoP has been conceptualised over time, whereby it was traditionally considered as something singular and limited, towards something much more dynamic. Results also show that diverse methods (both quantitative and qualitative) have been used to measure SoP, but the choice of method is often a result of resource constraints that limit research design. These findings suggest that broader collaboration among stakeholders and increased interdisciplinarity would undoubtedly lead to improved outcomes in our understanding of SoP, specifically how it is changing in response to anthropogenic pressures, and how the results can be integrated into policy and practice to support environment conservation and management. It is hoped these findings can help establish a community of practice around how we conceptualise SoP, and hence understand it, to create space for methodological integration and shared learnings as a field.

Common Interests Without Common Expertise: Reflections on Early-career Experiences in Cross-Disciplinary Research

Cross-disciplinary research enables us to tackle complex problems that require expertise from different fields. Such collaborations involve researchers who have different perspectives, communication styles, and knowledge bases, and can produce results far greater than the sum of their parts. However, in an era of increasing scientific specialization, there exist many barriers for students and early-career researchers (ECRs) interested in training and undertaking interdisciplinary research endeavors. This perspective examines the challenges that students and ECRs perceive and experience in cross-disciplinary work and proposes pathways to create more inclusive and welcoming research environments. This work emerges from a National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded workshop held during the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology (SICB) Annual Meeting in January 2023 in Austin, TX. The workshop brought together seasoned interdisciplinary scientists with undergraduate and graduate students to identify and discuss perceived challenges through small group discussions and experience sharing. Through summarizing a range of student concerns about embarking on careers as interdisciplinary scientists and identifying ways to dismantle institutional and lab management-level barriers, we aim to promote an inclusive and collaborative problem-solving environment for scientists of all experience levels.

Institutional Context of Pest Management Science in the Global South

The natural sciences are receiving increasing attention in the Global South. This timely development may help mitigate global change and quicken an envisioned food system transformation. Yet in order to resolve complex issues such as agrochemical pollution, science ideally proceeds along suitable trajectories within appropriate institutional contexts. Here, we employ a systematic literature review to map the nature of inquiry and institutional context of pest management science in 65 low- and middle-income countries published from 2010 to 2020. Despite large inter-country variability, any given country generates an average of 5.9 publications per annum (range 0-45.9) and individual nations such as Brazil, Kenya, Benin, Vietnam, and Turkey engage extensively in regional cooperation. International development partners are prominent scientific actors in West Africa but are commonly outpaced by national institutions and foreign academia in other regions. Transnational institutions such as the CGIAR represent a 1.4-fold higher share of studies on host plant resistance but lag in public interest science disciplines such as biological control. Despite high levels of scientific abstraction, research conducted jointly with development partners shows real yet marginal improvements in incorporating the multiple (social-ecological) layers of the farming system. Added emphasis on integrative system-level approaches and agroecological or biodiversity-driven measures can extend the reach of science to unlock transformative change.

FENS-Kavli Network of Excellence: Postponed, non-competitive peer review for research funding

Receiving research grants is among the highlights of an academic career, affirming previous accomplishments and enabling new research endeavours. Much of the process of acquiring research funding, however, belongs to the less favourite duties of many researchers: It is time consuming, often stressful and, in the majority of cases, unsuccessful. This resentment towards funding acquisition is backed up by empirical research: The current system to distribute research funding, via competitive calls for extensive research applications that undergo peer review, has repeatedly been shown to fail in its task to reliably rank proposals according to their merit, while at the same time being highly inefficient. The simplest, fairest and broadly supported alternative would be to distribute funding more equally across researchers, for example, by an increase of universities' base funding, thereby saving considerable time that can be spent on research instead. Here, I propose how to combine such a 'funding flat rate' model-or other efficient distribution strategies-with quality control through postponed, non-competitive peer review using open science practices.

CGG toolkit: Software components for computational genomics

Public-domain availability for bioinformatics software resources is a key requirement that ensures long-term permanence and methodological reproducibility for research and development across the life sciences. These issues are particularly critical for widely used, efficient, and well-proven methods, especially those developed in research settings that often face funding discontinuities. We re-launch a range of established software components for computational genomics, as legacy version 1.0.1, suitable for sequence matching, masking, searching, clustering and visualization for protein family discovery, annotation and functional characterization on a genome scale. These applications are made available online as open source and include MagicMatch, GeneCAST, support scripts for CoGenT-like sequence collections, GeneRAGE and DifFuse, supported by centrally administered bioinformatics infrastructure funding. The toolkit may also be conceived as a flexible genome comparison software pipeline that supports research in this domain. We illustrate basic use by examples and pictorial representations of the registered tools, which are further described with appropriate documentation files in the corresponding GitHub release.

Assessing evidence on the impacts of nature-based interventions for climate change mitigation: a systematic map of primary and secondary research from subtropical and tropical terrestrial regions

BACKGROUND

Nature-based interventions (NbIs) for climate change mitigation include a diverse set of interventions aimed at conserving, restoring, and/or managing natural and modified ecosystems to improve their ability to store and sequester carbon and avoid greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Recent projections estimate that terrestrial NbIs can lead to more than one-third of the climate change mitigation necessary to meet the Paris Climate Agreement by 2030. Further, these interventions can provide co-benefits in the form of social and ecological outcomes. Despite growing recognition of the potential benefits, a clear characterization of the distribution and occurrence of evidence which supports linkages between different types of NbIs and outcomes for climate change mitigation, ecosystems, and people remains poorly understood.

METHODS

This systematic map assesses the evidence base on the links between NbIs and climate change mitigation, social, and ecological outcomes in tropical and subtropical terrestrial regions. We searched three bibliographic databases, 65 organization websites, and conducted backward citation chasing within 39 existing evidence syntheses to identify relevant articles. Additionally, we reached out to key informants for additional sources of evidence. We then used machine learning to rank returned results by relevance at the title and abstract stage and manually screened for inclusion using predefined criteria at the title, abstract, and full text stages. We extracted relevant meta-data from included articles using an a priori coding scheme. Lastly, we conducted a targeted, complementary search to identify relevant review and synthesis articles to provide broader context for the findings of the systematic map.

REVIEW FINDINGS

We included 948 articles in this systematic map. Most of the evidence base (56%) examined links between protection, natural resource management, and restoration interventions with changes to 'proxy' outcomes for climate change mitigation (changes to land condition, land cover, and/or land use). Other areas with high occurrence of articles included linkages between interventions within natural resource management and trees in croplands categories and changes to aboveground carbon storage and/or sequestration (17% of articles). A key knowledge gap was on measured changes in GHG emissions across all intervention types (6% of articles). Overall, articles in the evidence base did not often assess changes in co-benefits alongside direct or indirect changes for climate change mitigation (32%). In most cases, the evidence base contained studies which did not explicitly test for causal linkages using appropriate experimental or quasi-experimental designs.

CONCLUSIONS

The evidence base for NbIs is significant and growing; however, key gaps in knowledge hamper the ability to inform ongoing and future investment and implementation at scale. More comprehensive evidence is needed to support causal inference between NbIs and direct outcomes for climate change mitigation to better determine additionality, permanence, leakage, and other unintended consequences. Similarly, priorities emerging from this map include the need for coordinated and harmonized efforts to collect diverse data types to better understand whether and how other outcomes (e.g. social, ecological) of NbIs can be achieved synergistically with mitigation objectives. Understanding potential benefits and trade-offs of NbIs is particularly urgent to inform rapidly expanding carbon markets for nature.

SciSciNet: A large-scale open data lake for the science of science research

The science of science has attracted growing research interests, partly due to the increasing availability of large-scale datasets capturing the innerworkings of science. These datasets, and the numerous linkages among them, enable researchers to ask a range of fascinating questions about how science works and where innovation occurs. Yet as datasets grow, it becomes increasingly difficult to track available sources and linkages across datasets. Here we present SciSciNet, a large-scale open data lake for the science of science research, covering over 134M scientific publications and millions of external linkages to funding and public uses. We offer detailed documentation of pre-processing steps and analytical choices in constructing the data lake. We further supplement the data lake by computing frequently used measures in the literature, illustrating how researchers may contribute collectively to enriching the data lake. Overall, this data lake serves as an initial but useful resource for the field, by lowering the barrier to entry, reducing duplication of efforts in data processing and measurements, improving the robustness and replicability of empirical claims, and broadening the diversity and representation of ideas in the field.

Surprising combinations of research contents and contexts are related to impact and emerge with scientific outsiders from distant disciplines

We investigate the degree to which impact in science and technology is associated with surprising breakthroughs, and how those breakthroughs arise. Identifying breakthroughs across science and technology requires models that distinguish surprising from expected advances at scale. Drawing on tens of millions of research papers and patents across the life sciences, physical sciences and patented inventions, and using a hypergraph model that predicts realized combinations of research contents (article keywords) and contexts (cited journals), here we show that surprise in terms of unexpected combinations of contents and contexts predicts outsized impact (within the top 10% of citations). These surprising advances emerge across, rather than within researchers or teams-most commonly when scientists from one field publish problem-solving results to an audience from a distant field. Our approach characterizes the frontier of science and technology as a complex hypergraph drawn from high-dimensional embeddings of research contents and contexts, and offers a measure of path-breaking surprise in science and technology.

Higher-order rich-club phenomenon in collaborative research grant networks

Modern scientific work, including writing papers and submitting research grant proposals, increasingly involves researchers from different institutions. In grant collaborations, it is known that institutions involved in many collaborations tend to densely collaborate with each other, forming rich clubs. Here we investigate higher-order rich-club phenomena in networks of collaborative research grants among institutions and their associations with research impact. Using publicly available data from the National Science Foundation in the US, we construct a bipartite network of institutions and collaborative grants, which distinguishes among the collaboration with different numbers of institutions. By extending the concept and algorithms of the rich club for dyadic networks to the case of bipartite networks, we find rich clubs both in the entire bipartite network and the bipartite subnetwork induced by the collaborative grants involving a given number of institutions up to five. We also find that the collaborative grants within rich clubs tend to be more impactful in a per-dollar sense than the control. Our results highlight advantages of collaborative grants among the institutions in the rich clubs.

A case study of the Ancientbiotics collaboration

Interdisciplinary collaboration is regarded as a desirable way of researching and, in some instances, even a requirement for academic teams and funding proposals. This paper explores the possibilities, but also the problems, of collaboration between different disciplines through a case study of the Ancientbiotics team. This team explores the potential of natural products contained in historical medical recipes. The search for clinically useful natural products in unusual places, such as historical medical practices, is a well-established endeavor in the scientific disciplines. The Ancientbiotics collaboration, largely based across UK institutions, takes this path a step forward in combining modern scientific knowledge of natural products with expertise from humanities to identify ingredient combinations. After 7 years of practice, the research has produced a variety of outcomes. This perspective will explore how the team worked within an interdisciplinary framework to advance investigation and application of historical medical recipes.

Zooming-in for climate action—hyperlocal greenhouse gas data for mitigation action?

While the international community has made progress in adopting goals and agreements in the field of climate change mitigation, efforts to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are significantly lacking behind global ambitions for acceptable climate change. In this perspective, we discuss whether a window of opportunity for more effective climate action is emerging due to the convergence of new scientific and technological opportunities to provide high-resolution information on GHG emissions and emerging polycentric governance forms. We hypothesize that scientific and technological developments in the geophysical sciences and geoinformatics could provide the information policy makers need to put in place effective policies on climate change mitigation and to have measures to verify the effectiveness of their mitigation policies. To contribute to a better understanding of these developments and the requirements for effective climate action, new forms of inter- and transdisciplinary research become urgently necessary.

Relationship between early-career collaboration among researchers and future funding success in Japanese academia

Academia is becoming more and more competitive, especially for young scientists, so it is important to understand the factors that affect success in academic careers. To survive in academia, it is crucial to obtain research funding. Previous studies have investigated factors that affect the funding success of researchers. In this paper, we focus on research collaboration structure as a factor affecting funding success. More specifically, we investigate the effects of participation in joint research projects, number of joint research projects, and centrality in the collaborative network on the future funding success of junior researchers in Japan. Our results show that participation in joint research projects and the number of such projects significantly affect the future funding success of junior researchers. Furthermore, the median number of years of funding received by researchers involved in joint research projects was found to be about 1.5 times greater than that of researchers not involved in joint research projects, and the average amount of research funding received after 10 years is about 2–4 times more, suggesting that researchers with collaboration ties with other researchers in the early stages of their career tend to be more successful in the future.

Public use and public funding of science

Knowledge of how science is consumed in public domains is essential for understanding the role of science in human society. Here we examine public use and public funding of science by linking tens of millions of scientific publications from all scientific fields to their upstream funding support and downstream public uses across three public domains-government documents, news media and marketplace invention. We find that different public domains draw from various scientific fields in specialized ways, showing diverse patterns of use. Yet, amidst these differences, we find two important forms of alignment. First, we find universal alignment between what the public consumes and what is highly impactful within science. Second, a field's public funding is strikingly aligned with the field's collective public use. Overall, public uses of science present a rich landscape of specialized consumption, yet, collectively, science and society interface with remarkable alignment between scientific use, public use and funding.

Perspectives on Climate Change and Pediatric Mental Health: a Qualitative Analysis of Interviews with Researchers in the Field

OBJECTIVE

There is a growing appreciation that climate change is affecting pediatric mental health, yet research in this field is in its infancy. The authors aimed to interview researchers in this space to identify themes that can help shape curricula and inform mentors guiding trainees entering this research area.

METHOD

A literature review was completed within PubMed, PsycINFO, and EMBASE for articles written in English and indexed between January 1, 2016, and August 1, 2021. The first and last authors of relevant articles were invited to be interviewed and to recommend other experts, from which 20 of 74 (27%) eligible participants were recruited. Standardized interviews were conducted virtually, transcribed, and qualitatively analyzed.

RESULTS

Participant responses clustered into two domains, each comprising three themes: (1) current and future research: epidemiology and education, interventions, and gaps in research; and (2) barriers: limited funding, psychological resistance, and logistical impediments. Research has been primarily limited to the phenomenology of eco-anxiety, the aftermath of natural disasters, and psychoeducational interventions. Participants provided insights into how the field can become more interventional, overcome psychological resistance among colleagues through education, and improve funding through calls for grants specific to this topic.

CONCLUSIONS

This study outlines perspectives on the cutting-edge directions of research in climate mental health for children and impediments to its progress. Generalizability is limited by the small sample of experts interviewed; however, these content experts' opinions can inform curriculum development and help mentors support mentees hoping to develop research careers in climate mental health.

Particles as carriers of matter in the aquatic environment: Challenges and ways ahead for transdisciplinary research

A diverse array of natural and anthropogenic particles found in the aquatic environment, can act as carriers of co-transported matter (CTM), such as nutrients, genetic material and contaminants. Thus, understanding carrier particle transport will increase our understanding of local and global fluxes of exogenous CTM (affiliated with the particle) and endogenous CTM (an inherent part of the particle). In the present contribution, researchers from multiple disciplines collaborated to provide perspectives on the interactions between carrier particles and CTM, and the fundamentals of transport of particles found in the aquatic environment and the generic spherical smooth particles, often used to make predictions about particle behavior in suspension. Evidently, the particles in the aquatic environment show a great variety of characteristics and vary greatly from each other as well as from the generic particle. However, in spite of these differences, many fundamental concepts apply to particles in general. We emphasize the importance of understanding the basic concepts of transport of particle-associated CTM, and the main assumptions in the generic-founded models, which are challenged by the diverging characteristics of particles found in the aquatic environment, as paramount moving forward. Additionally, we identified the need for a conceptual and semantic link between different scientific fields of particle research and initiated the formation of a consistent terminology. Disciplinary and organizational (academic and funding) barriers need to be overcome to enable individual researchers to move beyond their knowledge sphere, to stimulate future interdisciplinary collaborations and to avoid research silos. Hereby, we can foster faster and better progress of evolving research fields on new and emerging anthropogenic carrier particles, and stimulate the development of solutions to the technological and environmental challenges.

Development and expansion in the marine social sciences: Insights from the global community

The importance of understanding the complexities of societal relationships with our global ocean, and how these influence sustainable management and effective, equitable governance, is crucial to addressing ocean challenges. Using established horizon scanning method, this paper explores current trends in marine social sciences through a survey of the global marine social science research and practitioner community (n = 106). We find that marine social sciences research is broad, covering themes relating to governance and decision-making, stakeholder participation and engagement, the socio-cultural dimensions of marine systems, ocean literacy, community-based and area-specific management, and the blue economy, and identify future research priorities highlighted by the community. Our results, however, suggest several barriers persist, including the relationship between marine social sciences and other disciplines, and the visibility and recognition of marine social sciences both internal and external to academia. Finally, the paper generates prospective thinking and highlights recommendations for future research and practice.

Anatomising the impact of ResearchGate followers and followings on influence identification

Influence analysis, derived from Social Network Analysis (SNA), is extremely useful in academic literature analytic. Different Academic Social Network Sites (ASNS) have been widely examined for influence analysis in terms of co-authorship and co-citation networks. The impact of other network-based features, such as followers and followings, provided by ASNS such as ResearchGate (RG) and Academia is yet to be anatomised. As proven in ingrained social theories, the followers and followings have significant impact in influence prorogation. This research aims at examining the same in one of the widely adopted ASNS, RG. The rendering process is developed to render real-time RG information, which is modelled into graph. Standard centrality measures are implemented to identify influential users from the constructed RG graph. Each centrality measure gives a list of top- k influential RG users. The results are compared with RGScore and Total Research Interest (TRI) to discover the most effective centrality measure. Betweenness and closeness centrality measures have shown the outperforming results compared with others. A procedure is established to discover influential RG users that are commonly present in all top- k centrality results to identify dominant skills, affiliations, departments and locations from the rendered data.

Patterns of interest change in stack overflow

Stack Overflow is currently the largest programming related question and answer community, containing multiple programming areas. The change of user's interest is the micro-representation of the intersection of macro-knowledge and has been widely studied in scientific fields, such as literature data sets. However, there is still very little research for the general public, such as the question and answer community. Therefore, we analyze the interest changes of 2,307,720 users in Stack Overflow in this work. Specifically, we classify the tag network in the community, vectorize the topic of questions to quantify the user's interest change patterns. Results show that the change pattern of user interest has the characteristic of a power-law distribution, which is different from the exponential distribution of scientists' interest change, but they are all affected by three features, heterogeneity, recency and proximity. Furthermore, the relationship between users' reputations and interest changes is negatively correlated, suggesting the importance of concentration, i.e., those who focus on specific areas are more likely to gain a higher reputation. In general, our work is a supplement to the public interest changes in science, and it can also help community managers better design recommendation algorithms and promote the healthy development of communities.

Recent trends in movement ecology of animals and human mobility

Movement is fundamental to life, shaping population dynamics, biodiversity patterns, and ecosystem structure. In 2008, the movement ecology framework (MEF Nathan et al. in PNAS 105(49):19052-19059, 2008) introduced an integrative theory of organismal movement-linking internal state, motion capacity, and navigation capacity to external factors-which has been recognized as a milestone in the field. Since then, the study of movement experienced a technological boom, which provided massive quantities of tracking data of both animal and human movement globally and at ever finer spatio-temporal resolutions. In this work, we provide a quantitative assessment of the state of research within the MEF, focusing on animal movement, including humans and invertebrates, and excluding movement of plants and microorganisms. Using a text mining approach, we digitally scanned the contents of [Formula: see text] papers from 2009 to 2018 available online, identified tools and methods used, and assessed linkages between all components of the MEF. Over the past decade, the publication rate has increased considerably, along with major technological changes, such as an increased use of GPS devices and accelerometers and a majority of studies now using the R software environment for statistical computing. However, animal movement research still largely focuses on the effect of environmental factors on movement, with motion and navigation continuing to receive little attention. A search of topics based on words featured in abstracts revealed a clustering of papers among marine and terrestrial realms, as well as applications and methods across taxa. We discuss the potential for technological and methodological advances in the field to lead to more integrated and interdisciplinary research and an increased exploration of key movement processes such as navigation, as well as the evolutionary, physiological, and life-history consequences of movement.

Musing about Interdisciplinary Research: Is Interdisciplinary Research Amusing or Bemusing?

We seek to contribute to the ongoing discussion about interdisciplinary research by contextualizing its benefits, challenges, and realities specifically within the management field. The purpose of this Musing is to highlight the a“musing” (i.e., entertaining) and be“musing” (i.e., confusing) experiences that we have had trying to publish interdisciplinary research so we can offer some recommendations for how the management field can stop ignoring something we all claim to be of great value. In our experience, interdisciplinary research is amusing if you're intrinsically motivated to do it, but it is bemusing if you expect it to be tied to extrinsic rewards.

Social benefits and individual costs of creativity in art and science: A statistical analysis based on a theoretical framework

In this study, we statistically identified and characterized the relationship between the long-run social benefits of creativity and the in-life individual costs (in terms of happiness and health) of creativity. To do so, we referred to a theoretical framework that depicts a creator’s life. We generated a balanced dataset of 200 creators (i.e., composers, painters, mathematicians and physicists, and biologists and chemists born between 1770 and 1879), and calculated standardized evaluations of the long-run social benefits in different domains (performances, exhibitions, citations). We performed regression analysis and identified the statistical determinants of the relationship between a creator’s social benefits and the costs to their happiness and health. We found that creativity represented an individual cost for all four creator groups, with a larger impact on happiness than on health; the cost was greater if creativity was based more on divergent than on convergent thinking or if authors faced greater language issues. The impacts of long-run social benefits on individual happiness and health were similar in the arts and sciences if institutional differences were taken into account.

Challenges facing interdisciplinary researchers: Findings from a professional development workshop

Interdisciplinary research is the synergistic combination of two or more disciplines to achieve one research objective. Current research highlights the importance of interdisciplinary research in science education, particularly between educational experts within a particular science discipline (discipline-based education researchers) and those who study human learning in a more general sense (learning scientists). However, this type of interdisciplinary research is not common and little empirical evidence exists that identifies barriers and possible solutions. We hosted a pre-conference workshop for Discipline-Based Educational Researchers and Learning Scientists designed to support interdisciplinary collaborations. We collected evidence during our workshop regarding barriers to interdisciplinary collaborations in science education, perceptions of perceived cohesion in participants' home university departments and professional communities, and the impact of our workshop on fostering new connections. Based on participants' responses, we identified three categories of barriers, Disciplinary Differences, Professional Integration, and Collaborative Practice. Using a post-conference survey, we found an inverse pattern in perceived cohesion to home departments compared to self-identified professional communities. Additionally, we found that after the workshop participants reported increased connections across disciplines. Our results provide empirical evidence regarding challenges to interdisciplinary research in science education and suggest that small professional development workshops have the potential for facilitating durable interdisciplinary networks where participants feel a sense of belonging not always available in their home departments.

STEM vs non-STEM differences in university teaching and research during the COVID-19 pandemic: the case of Sri Lanka

Purpose

This study aims to explore the differences between science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) and non-STEM disciplines in terms of the changes to teaching and research practices caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Design/methodology/approach

The paper analyses survey responses collected between July and November 2020 from 241 academics (excluding library staff) from the five oldest state universities in Sri Lanka. The analysis focuses on the differences between STEM and non-STEM faculty using multiple linear regression to control for demographic characteristics such as age, gender and designation as well as university-specific factors.

Findings

The paper finds significant differences in the teaching practices of STEM and non-STEM academics, both in terms of preparation time for teaching and tools used for online delivery. Significant differences are also observed in research practices, with STEM faculty being significantly more likely to engage in research collaborations, obtain research funding and be involved in more research projects. The authors do not find any evidence of the pandemic having differential impacts on research productivity between the broad disciplines.

Originality/value

This research provides insights into the differences between STEM and non-STEM disciplines in online teaching and research practices adopted since the onset of the pandemic, which are important for formulating appropriate policy responses to mitigate the impact of the pandemic on both students and staff. The contribution is particularly significant for developing countries where the creation of a skilled workforce is a key driver of the development process.

Toward greater consistency and validity in measuring interdisciplinarity: a systematic and conceptual evaluation

While interdisciplinary research (IDR) has attracted much attention, this has not yet resulted in a coherent body of knowledge of interdisciplinarity. One of the impediments is a lack of consensus on its conceptualization and measurement. Some of the proposed measures have shown to misalign empirically, meaning that conclusions about IDR can differ across measures. To clarify this disagreement conceptually, and to stimulate better coherence in measurement, this paper starts with a review of the IDR definitions. From a synthesis of these definitions, we provide a conceptual definition and a logical structure of the construct, and derive evaluation criteria for its measures. We use these to evaluate 21 measures of IDR. The results show that measures vary widely in meeting the criteria, which can explain some of the observed inconsistencies in earlier studies. We discuss the most common limitations and present empirical analyses to gauge their severity. We present several suggestions for future measurement of the interdisciplinarity of research. We hope that with these suggestions, researchers can draw more consistent conclusions, aiding in the development of a coherent body of knowledge of this ever-important phenomenon.

Making a Difference: Planning for Engaged Participation in Environmental Research

Despite the rapid and accelerating rate of global environmental changes, too often research that has the potential to inform more sustainable futures remains disconnected from the context in which it could be used. Though transdisciplinary approaches (TDA) are known to overcome this disconnect, institutional barriers frequently prevent their deployment. Here we use insights from a qualitative comparative analysis of five case studies to develop a process for helping researchers and funders conceptualize and implement socially engaged research within existing institutional structures. The process we propose is meant to help researchers achieve societal as well as scientific outcomes relatively early in a project, as an end in itself or en route to greater engagement later. If projects that have a strong foundation of dialog and shared power wish to use TDA within current institutional and academic structures, we suggest that they focus on three process-based factors to increase their chances for success: (1) the maturity of relationships within a collaboration, (2) the level of context knowledge present within the collaborative team, and (3) the intensity of the engagement efforts within the project.

[A critique of the managerial model of research]

To be a scientist is to make an implicit ethical commitment: to try to tell the truth about the world. The managerial model of research, which is the ideological foundation of modern political reforms of the research system around the world, stands in direct conflict with this assertion. It consists in identifying the scientist with a homo economicus looking to maximize its own profit, which a bureaucracy is tasked to align with performance objectives. This model is incoherent and destructive. Science is made possible by curiosity, emulation and intellectual ethics. These are the human traits that a rational research organization should try to favor and exploit.

The speed of information propagation in the scientific network distorts biomedical research

Delays in the propagation of scientific discoveries across scientific communities have been an oft-maligned feature of scientific research for introducing a bias towards knowledge that is produced within a scientist's closest community. The vastness of the scientific literature has been commonly blamed for this phenomenon, despite recent improvements in information retrieval and text mining. Its actual negative impact on scientific progress, however, has never been quantified. This analysis attempts to do so by exploring its effects on biomedical discovery, particularly in the discovery of relations between diseases, genes and chemical compounds. Results indicate that the probability that two scientific facts will enable the discovery of a new fact depends on how far apart these two facts were originally within the scientific landscape. In particular, the probability decreases exponentially with the citation distance. Thus, the direction of scientific progress is distorted based on the location in which each scientific fact is published, representing a path-dependent bias in which originally closely-located discoveries drive the sequence of future discoveries. To counter this bias, scientists should open the scope of their scientific work with modern information retrieval and extraction approaches.