Early-career setback and future career impact

Promotional language and the adoption of innovative ideas in science

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 may help to convey an innovative idea's originality and significance. Our analysis attempts to surmount the limitations of prior grant studies by examining the full text of tens of thousands of both funded and unfunded grants from three leading public and private funding agencies: the NIH, the NSF, and the Novo Nordisk Foundation, one of the world's largest private science funding foundations. We find a robust association between promotional language and the support and adoption of innovative ideas by funders and other scientists. First, a grant proposal's percentage of promotional language is associated with up to a doubling of the grant's probability of being funded. Second, a grant's promotional language reflects its intrinsic innovativeness. Third, the percentage of promotional language is predictive of the expected citation and productivity impact of publications that are supported by funded grants. Finally, a computer-assisted experiment that manipulates the promotional language in our data demonstrates how promotional language can communicate the merit of ideas through cognitive activation. With the incidence of promotional language in science steeply rising, and the pivotal role of grants in converting promising and aspirational ideas into solutions, our analysis provides empirical evidence that promotional language is associated with effectively communicating the merits of innovative scientific ideas.

Where next for partial randomisation of research funding? The feasibility of RCTs and alternatives

We outline essential considerations for any study of partial randomisation of research funding, and consider scenarios in which randomised controlled trials (RCTs) would be feasible and appropriate. We highlight the interdependence of target outcomes, sample availability and statistical power for determining the cost and feasibility of a trial. For many choices of target outcome, RCTs may be less practical and more expensive than they at first appear (in large part due to issues pertaining to sample size and statistical power). As such, we briefly discuss alternatives to RCTs. It is worth noting that many of the considerations relevant to experiments on partial randomisation may also apply to other potential experiments on funding processes (as described in The Experimental Research Funder's Handbook. RoRI, June 2022).

Targeted, actionable and fair: Reviewer reports as feedback and its effect on ECR career choices

Previous studies of the use of peer review for the allocation of competitive funding agencies have concentrated on questions of efficiency and how to make the 'best' decision, by ensuring that successful applicants are also the more productive or visible in the long term. This paper examines the components of feedback received from an unsuccessful grant application, is associated with motivating applicants career decisions to persist (reapply for funding at T1), or to switch (not to reapply, or else leave academia). This study combined data from interviews with unsuccessful ECR applicants (n = 19) to The Wellcome Trust 2009-19, and manual coding of reviewer comments received by applicants (n = 81). All applicants received feedback on their application at T0 with a large proportion of unsuccessful applicants reapplying for funding at T1. Here, peer-review-comments-as-feedback sends signals to applicants to encourage them to persist (continue) or switch (not continue) even when the initial application has failed. Feedback associated by unsuccessful applicants as motivating their decision to resubmit had three characteristics: actionable; targeted; and fair. The results lead to identification of standards of feedback for funding agencies and peer-reviewers to promote when providing reviewer feedback to applicants as part of their peer review process. The provision of quality reviewer-reports-as-feedback to applicants, ensures that peer review acts as a participatory research governance tool focused on supporting the development of individuals and their future research plans.

Data, measurement and empirical methods in the science of science

The advent of large-scale datasets that trace the workings of science has encouraged researchers from many different disciplinary backgrounds to turn scientific methods into science itself, cultivating a rapidly expanding 'science of science'. This Review considers this growing, multidisciplinary literature through the lens of data, measurement and empirical methods. We discuss the purposes, strengths and limitations of major empirical approaches, seeking to increase understanding of the field's diverse methodologies and expand researchers' toolkits. Overall, new empirical developments provide enormous capacity to test traditional beliefs and conceptual frameworks about science, discover factors associated with scientific productivity, predict scientific outcomes and design policies that facilitate scientific progress.

Beijing's central role in global artificial intelligence research

Nations worldwide are mobilizing to harness the power of Artificial Intelligence (AI) given its massive potential to shape global competitiveness over the coming decades. Using a dataset of 2.2 million AI papers, we study inter-city citations, collaborations, and talent migrations to uncover dependencies between Eastern and Western cities worldwide. Beijing emerges as a clear outlier, as it has been the most impactful city since 2007, the most productive since 2002, and the one housing the largest number of AI scientists since 1995. Our analysis also reveals that Western cities cite each other far more frequently than expected by chance, East-East collaborations are far more common than East-West or West-West collaborations, and migration of AI scientists mostly takes place from one Eastern city to another. We then propose a measure that quantifies each city's role in bridging East and West. Beijing's role surpasses that of all other cities combined, making it the central gateway through which knowledge and talent flow from one side to the other. We also track the center of mass of AI research by weighing each city's geographic location by its impact, productivity, and AI workforce. The center of mass has moved thousands of kilometers eastward over the past three decades, with Beijing's pull increasing each year. These findings highlight the eastward shift in the tides of global AI research, and the growing role of the Chinese capital as a hub connecting researchers across the globe.

Demographic Factors Associated With Research and Career Interests in Aspiring Academic Surgeons: What are the Implications for Tomorrow's Workforce?

OBJECTIVE

To evaluate the research and career interests of aspiring academic surgeons and determine the influence of demographic factors.

DESIGN

Cross-sectional survey SETTING: Single institution, academic general surgery residency program PARTICIPANTS: Medical students invited to interview during 2019-2020 and 2020-2021 residency cycle RESULTS: One hundred fifty-four of 160 (96%) potential respondents representing 63 medical schools completed the survey, American Association for Public Opinion Research Response Rate 6. Fifty-three percent of the study population was female. Seventeen percent identified as Black, 14% Asian, 13% Latinx, 50% white, and 6% other. Respondents were most interested in education, professional development, and surgical culture (32%) followed by basic and translational science (23%), global and community health (20%), and health services (18%). On multiple logistic regression, interest in global/community health was associated with identifying as Black (OR 5.9 [2.0, 17.8] p = 0.001) and female (OR 2.7 [1.0, 7.0] p = 0.044). A plurality of participants were undecided on future specialty (n = 63, 41%). The most common specialty interests were surgical oncology (n = 28, 18%); trauma, acute care, or surgical critical care (n = 21, 14%); pediatric and cardiothoracic surgery (n = 20 for each, 13%); and abdominal transplant (n = 15, 10%).

CONCLUSIONS

In this cross-sectional survey of highly competitive academic general surgery applicants, respondents who were underrepresented in medicine (URiM) and women were more interested in research fields with a history of lower relative NIH funding. In light of these findings, academic programs seeking a more diverse residency workforce should consider strategies beyond recruitment to promote the scholarly achievement of women and URiM residents.

The Role of Challenge in Talent Development: Understanding Impact in Response to Emotional Disturbance

(1) Background: The pursuit of excellence is central to most development environments, and this is particularly the case in high-performance sport. Accordingly, we examined some mechanisms for development, focusing on the nature and impact of challenge in the experiences of more or less successful high-level rugby players. (2) Methods: Retrospective interviews were conducted with two groups of players. All had been successful on the development pathway (i.e., recruited to high level academies and selected as age group internationals). Only some had progressed to senior contracts and international selection, offering a basis for contrast. (3) Results: Data suggest the importance of negative experiences in the development of performers and performance. Importantly, however, the impact is dependent on both the skills of the individual and the style, timing and context of the challenge. (4) Conclusions: Negative experiences seemed to offer developmental opportunities wider than just learning to cope, at least for those who eventually succeeded. In short, progress was dependent on an interaction between individual skill, interpretation, context and social setting. The need for coaches and others to develop the appropriate attitudes and approach to challenge is a clear implication.

Does early publishing in top journals really predict long-term scientific success in the business field?

The soaring number of researchers has led to increasingly intense competition in academia. Early identification of scientists’ potential is a practical but difficult issue currently attracting escalating attention. This study takes the business field as an example and explores whether early publishing in top journals is an effective yardstick to recognise scientists who will have better academic performance in their careers. We extract the career records of publication and citations for 1933 business scientists with stable and continuous publication records from the combination of the ORCID and Scopus databases. Through regression analysis and various checks, we find that researchers publishing in top journals early in their careers indeed perform better subsequently compared to peers with similar early career profiles but no top journal publications. Our research sheds light on a new perspective for early identification of potential star scientists, especially in the business field, and justifies encouraging junior researchers to devote themselves to publishing in top-ranked peer-reviewed journals.

Weak ties, failed tries, and success

A large-scale study provides a causal test for a cornerstone of social science

RASE: Modeling cumulative disadvantage due to marginalized group status in academia

We propose a framework of Resources, Achievement, Status, and Events (RASE) that allows the many disparate but well-documented phenomena affecting underrepresented groups in STEM to be assembled into a story of career trajectories, illuminating the possible cumulative impact of many small inequities. Our framework contains a three-component deterministic cycle of (1) production of Achievements from Resources, (2) updated community Status due to Achievements, and (3) accrual of additional Resources based on community Status. A fourth component, stochastic Events, can influence an individual’s level of Resources or Achievements at each time step of the cycle. We build a specific mathematical model within the RASE framework and use it to investigate the impact of accumulated disadvantages from multiple compounding variables. We demonstrate that the model can reproduce data of observed disparities in academia. Finally, we use a publicly available visualization and networking tool to provide a sandbox for exploring career outcomes within the model. The modeling exercise, results, and visualization tool may be useful in the context of training STEM faculty to recognize and reduce effects of bias.

Scientific prizes and the extraordinary growth of scientific topics

Fast growing scientific topics have famously been key harbingers of the new frontiers of science, yet, large-scale analyses of their genesis and impact are rare. We investigated one possible factor connected with a topic’s extraordinary growth: scientific prizes. Our longitudinal analysis of nearly all recognized prizes worldwide and over 11,000 scientific topics from 19 disciplines indicates that topics associated with a scientific prize experience extraordinary growth in productivity, impact, and new entrants. Relative to matched non-prizewinning topics, prizewinning topics produce 40% more papers and 33% more citations, retain 55% more scientists, and gain 37 and 47% more new entrants and star scientists, respectively, in the first five-to-ten years after the prize. Funding do not account for a prizewinning topic’s growth. Rather, growth is positively related to the degree to which the prize is discipline-specific, conferred for recent research, or has prize money. These findings reveal new dynamics behind scientific innovation and investment.

Scientific revolutions have famously inspired scientists and innovation but large-scale analyses of scientific revolutions in modern science are rare. Here, the authors investigate one possible factor connected with a topic’s extraordinary growth—scientific prizes.

Surface-assisted fabrication of low-dimensional carbon-based nanoarchitectures

On-surface synthesis, as an alternative to traditional in-solution synthesis, has become an emerging research field and attracted extensive attention over the past decade due to its ability to fabricate nanoarchitectures with exotic properties. Compared to wet chemistry, the on-surface synthesis conducted on atomically flat solid surfaces under ultrahigh vacuum exhibits unprecedented characteristics and advantages, opening novel reaction pathways for chemical synthesis. Various low-dimensional nanostructures have been fabricated on solid surfaces (mostly metal surfaces) based on this newly developed approach. This paper reviews the classic and latest works regarding carbon-based low-dimensional nanostructures since the arrival of on-surface synthesis era. These nanostructures are categorized into zero-, one- and two-dimensional classes and each class is composed of numerous sub-nanostructures. For certain specific nanostructures, comprehensive reports are given, including precursor design, substrate choice, synthetic strategies and so forth. We hope that our review will shed light on the fabrication of some significant nanostructures in this young and promising scientific area.

The modified lottery: Formalizing the intrinsic randomness of research funding

Competition for research funds has, in the recent decade, become hypercompetitive. Commonly, to determine which proposals receive funding, a system of peer review is used, which is broadly accepted, easily understood, and broadly trusted among researchers. It is often considered the best system in use, but it suffers from important shortcomings, and adaptations to overcome these shortcomings have small and often short-lived effects. Hence, the preference for peer review does not mean it necessarily outperforms all other systems. In fact, it is time for an open discussion about alternative allocation mechanisms. Random allocation of research funding may be a viable alternative to the current peer review system. In particular the "organized randomness" of a modified lottery is interesting, combining the benefits of randomization with some of the most valuable aspects of peer review. Still, many questions remain and this is certainly not a plea to allocate all research funds using lotteries without further research. But we need to be prepared to consider alternatives, even though they are not perfect, and modified lotteries should be part of the solution.

Inclusion in the Pulmonary, Critical Care, and Sleep Medicine Physician-Scientist Workforce. Building with Intention

Physician-scientists comprise an exceedingly small fraction of the physician workforce. As the fields of pulmonary, critical care, and sleep medicine continue to invest in the development of the physician-scientist workforce, recruitment and retention strategies need to consider the temporal trend in the decline in numbers of trainees pursuing basic research, the challenges of trainees from underrepresented groups in medicine, and opportunities for career and scientific advancement of women physician-scientists. In this perspective article, we examine the headwinds in the training and education of physician-scientists and highlight potential solutions to reverse these trends.

Mentorship and protégé success in STEM fields

Einstein believed that mentors are especially influential in a protégé's intellectual development, yet the link between mentorship and protégé success remains a mystery. We marshaled genealogical data on nearly 40,000 scientists who published 1,167,518 papers in biomedicine, chemistry, math, or physics between 1960 and 2017 to investigate the relationship between mentorship and protégé achievement. In our data, we find groupings of mentors with similar records and reputations who attracted protégés of similar talents and expected levels of professional success. However, each grouping has an exception: One mentor has an additional hidden capability that can be mentored to their protégés. They display skill in creating and communicating prizewinning research. Because the mentor's ability for creating and communicating celebrated research existed before the prize's conferment, protégés of future prizewinning mentors can be uniquely exposed to mentorship for conducting celebrated research. Our models explain 34-44% of the variance in protégé success and reveals three main findings. First, mentorship strongly predicts protégé success across diverse disciplines. Mentorship is associated with a 2×-to-4× rise in a protégé's likelihood of prizewinning, National Academy of Science (NAS) induction, or superstardom relative to matched protégés. Second, mentorship is significantly associated with an increase in the probability of protégés pioneering their own research topics and being midcareer late bloomers. Third, contrary to conventional thought, protégés do not succeed most by following their mentors' research topics but by studying original topics and coauthoring no more than a small fraction of papers with their mentors.