Measuring Researcher Diversity and its Impact on Awards

Tanu Malik Computation InstituteAndrey Rzhetsky Department of Human GeneticsIan Foster Computation Institute

University of Chicago Argonne National Laboratory

History

Renaissance polymath, painter, sculptor, architect, musician, mathematician, engineer, inventor, anatomist, geologist, cartographer, botanist, and writer

Einstein

Bohr

Darwin

Leonardo da Vinci

Biological species

Short Term: Competition Long Term: Changing Environments

Competition

Adapted from: Levine, J. M. & HilleRisLambers, J. (2012) The Maintenance of Species Diversity. Nature Education Knowledge 3(10):59

Niche Differences

Biological species: Specialist/Generalist

Short Term: Competition Long Term: Changing Environments

Competition

Adapted from: Levine, J. M. & HilleRisLambers, J. (2012) The Maintenance of Species Diversity. Nature Education Knowledge 3(10):59

Niche Differences

Science Research

Short Term: Competition on Topics Long Term: Changing Funding Situation

Competition Niche Differences

Why is this important?

• Research articles whose coauthors are in different departments at the same university receive more citations than those authored in a single department (Katz et.al, 1997).

• Multi–university collaborations that include a top tier–university were found to produce the highest–impact research articles (Jones, et al., 2008).

• It has also been demonstrated that scholarly work covering a range of fields — and patents generated by larger teams of co–authors —tend to have greater impact over time (Wuchty, et al., 2007).

• In the area of nanotechnology authors who have a diverse set of collaborators tend to write articles that have higher impact (Rafolset. al., 2010).

• Finally, diverse groups can, depending on the type of task, outperform individual experts or even groups of experts (Page, 2007).

Individual Focus

• Some mathematicians are birds, other are frogs. Birds fly high in the air, frogs live in the mud below.. (Freeman Dyson, AMS Einstein Lecture, 2008)

• “Foxes”, individuals who know many little things, tend to make better predictions about future outcomes than “hedgehogs” who focus on one big thing (Tetlock, 2005)

• Individuals’ degree of focus is positively correlated with the quality of their contributions (Adamic, 2010)

Goals and Problems

• Goal: Quantify the ability of each class of researchers (specialists/generalists) to competition in near term and adapt to changing funding requirements in the long term.

A. How to determine specialist and generalist researchers?

B. How to quantify the ability to compete/adapt?

A. Researcher Diversity

• Based on their publication history, determine if their interests can be classified into highly varied interests or focused interests

• Researcher profiles created from PubMed

Creating Researcher Profiles

• Author Disambiguation– Data mining methods

– Microsoft Academic Search• Automated profiles of users

• Web scraping

• Person’s organization and domain

of interest as disambiguating features

– Harvard Profiles• Directly links to PubMed

• Also takes an input of publications

claimed by an author.

Researcher’s Interests

• Controlled Vocabulary

• Keywords

• Topic Modeling

Controlled Vocabulary

• Medical Subject Headings (MeSH)

– poly-hierarchy of 25,186 medical concepts

Researcher Diversity

• Shannon’s Entropy

pi: proportion of individual’s contributions in category i

– Category = MeSH term

– Frequency over years

0.00 0.41 0.82 1.00 1.59 2.00

1.000.99

Shannon Vs Sterling

• Variety: how many different areas an individual contributes

• Balance: how evenly their efforts are distributed among these areas; and,

• Similarity, or how related those areas are

B. Quantifying the Ability to Compete

• Entropy has a negative correlation with measures of impact and productivity, viz. the h-index and the g-index.

• Result (in a way) reconfirms Adamic’s result of positive correlation between specialist and productivity

Geniuses, Birds, Beavers, Frogs

Geniuses: Dwell on many topics at all times (8-9)Birds: Dwell on many topics over their research career, but a few topics at a given timeBeavers: Specialists whose focus is interdisciplinaryFrogs: High-focused

A Bird

A Frog

Impact of Researcher Diversity on Awards

Future Work

• Larger datasets

• Researchers in the long tail are specialists; generalists are in the head of the tail;

Summary

• A framework to understand researcher diversity

• Quantification of researcher diversity with productivity and awards

• Negative correlation of diversity with productivity and positive with awards

• Use more accurate author disambiguation methods