Scientific teams: Self-assembly, fluidness, and interdependence

Size of science team at university and internal co-publications: science policy implications

Scientific collaboration within a science team (unit, group, etc.) has been under scrutiny. Recently, science of team science has emerged to use science for deep understanding of the ways researchers jointly perform science to increase their team’s performance. This article analyses internal scientific outputs with respect to the size of university’s science team. The objective is to examine the science policy motive that is, if the team size increases, by encouraging academics to gather in larger teams, then their outputs increase. The method of the contrapositive of this conditional statement is adopted. Thus, 120 accredited teams, composed of about 1500 academics in four universities in Morocco, were analyzed using a cross-matrix of members’ co-publications, an intra-collaboration index, Lorenz curve of both internal co-publications and sole-publications, with respect to team’s size. Our findings show that internal co-publications and sole ones are higher for small size teams and that the Lorenz distributions of these two indicators are unequal in favor of small size teams. We discuss the implications of our findings for science policy, beyond size, such as the output- instead of input-based perspective to form a team, time requirement to build a collaborative team, inter- and intra-disciplinarity oriented research, team directorship, etc.

The dominance of big teams in China’s scientific output

Modern science is dominated by scientific productions from teams. A recent finding shows that teams of both large and small sizes are essential in research, prompting us to analyze the extent to which a country’s scientific work is carried out by big or small teams. Here, using over 26 million publications from Web of Science, we find that China’s research output is more dominated by big teams than the rest of the world, which is particularly the case in fields of natural science. Despite the global trend that more papers are written by big teams, China’s drop in small team output is much steeper. As teams in China shift from small to large size, the team diversity that is essential for innovative work does not increase as much as that in other countries. Using the national average as the baseline, we find that the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) supports fewer small teams than the National Science Foundation (NSF) of the United States does, implying that big teams are preferred by grant agencies in China. Our finding provides new insights into the concern of originality and innovation in China, which indicates a need to balance small and big teams.

Academic social networks and collaboration patterns

Purpose

This study attempts to use a new source of data collection from open government data sets to identify potential academic social networks (ASNs) and defines their collaboration patterns. The purpose of this paper is to propose a direction that may advance our current understanding on how or why ASNs are formed or motivated and influence their research collaboration.

Design/methodology/approach

This study first reviews the open data sets in Taiwan, which is ranked as the first state in Global Open Data Index published by Open Knowledge Foundation to select the data sets that expose the government’s R&D activities. Then, based on the theory review of research collaboration, potential ASNs in those data sets are identified and are further generalized as various collaboration patterns. A research collaboration framework is used to present these patterns.

Findings

Project-based social networks, learning-based social networks and institution-based social networks are identified and linked to various collaboration patterns. Their collaboration mechanisms, e.g., team composition, motivation, relationship, measurement, and benefit-cost, are also discussed and compared.

Originality/value

In traditional, ASNs have usually been known as co-authorship networks or co-inventorship networks due to the limitation of data collection. This study first identifies some ASNs that may be formed before co-authorship networks or co-inventorship networks are formally built-up, and may influence the outcomes of research collaborations. These information allow researchers to deeply dive into the structure of ASNs and resolve collaboration mechanisms.

Long-Term Inpatient Hospital Utilisation and Costs (2007-2008 to 2015-2016) for Publicly Waitlisted Bariatric Surgery Patients in an Australian Public Hospital System Based on Australia's Activity-Based Funding Model

BACKGROUND

Within the Australian public hospital setting, no studies have previously reported total hospital utilisation and costs (pre/postoperatively) and costed patient-level pathways for primary bariatric surgery and surgical sequelae (including secondary surgery) informed by Australia's Independent Hospital Pricing Authority's activity-based funding (ABF) model.

OBJECTIVE

We aimed to provide our Tasmanian state government partner with information regarding key evidence gaps about the resource use and costs of bariatric surgery (including pre- and postoperatively, types of surgery and comorbidities), the costs of surgical sequelae and policy direction regarding the types of bariatric surgery offered within the Tasmanian public hospital system.

METHODS

Hospital inpatient length of stay (days), episodes of care (number) and aggregated cost data were extracted for people who were waiting for and subsequently received bariatric surgery (for the fiscal years 2007-2008 to 2015-2016) from administrative sources routinely collected, clinically coded/costed according to ABF. Aggregated ABF costs were expressed in 2016-2017 Australian dollars ($A). Sensitivity (cost outliers) and subgroup analyses were conducted.

RESULTS

A total of 105 patients entered the study. Total costs (pre/postoperative over 8 years) for all inpatient episodes of care (n = 779 episodes of care) were $A6,018,349. When the ten cost outliers were omitted from the total cost, this cost reduced to $A4,749,265. Mean costs for primary laparoscopic adjustable gastric band (LAGB) and sleeve gastrectomy (SG) bariatric surgery were $A14,622 and $A15,014, respectively. The average cost/episode of care for people with diabetes decreased in the first year postoperatively, from $A7258 to $A5830/episode of care. In total, 27 LAGB patients (30%) required surgery due to surgical sequelae (including revisional/secondary surgery; n = 58 episodes of care) and 56% of these episodes of care were secondary LAGB device related (mostly port/reservoir related), with a mean cost of $A6267.

CONCLUSIONS

Taking into account our small SG sample size and the short time horizon for investigating surgical sequalae for SG, costs may be mitigated in the Tasmanian public hospital system by substituting LAGB with SG when clinically appropriate due to costs associated with the LAGB device for some patients. At 3 years postoperatively versus preoperatively, episodes of care and costs reduced substantially, particularly for people with diabetes/cardiovascular disease. We recommend that a larger confirmatory study of bariatric surgery including LAGB and SG be undertaken of disaggregated ABF costs in the Tasmanian public hospital system.

Measuring quality and outcomes of research collaborations: An integrative review

INTRODUCTION

Although the science of team science is no longer a new field, the measurement of team science and its standardization remain in relatively early stages of development. To describe the current state of team science assessment, we conducted an integrative review of measures of research collaboration quality and outcomes.

METHODS

Collaboration measures were identified using both a literature review based on specific keywords and an environmental scan. Raters abstracted details about the measures using a standard tool. Measures related to collaborations with clinical care, education, and program delivery were excluded from this review.

RESULTS

We identified 44 measures of research collaboration quality, which included 35 measures with reliability and some form of statistical validity reported. Most scales focused on group dynamics. We identified 89 measures of research collaboration outcomes; 16 had reliability and 15 had a validity statistic. Outcome measures often only included simple counts of products; publications rarely defined how counts were delimited, obtained, or assessed for reliability. Most measures were tested in only one venue.

CONCLUSIONS

Although models of collaboration have been developed, in general, strong, reliable, and valid measurements of such collaborations have not been conducted or accepted into practice. This limitation makes it difficult to compare the characteristics and impacts of research teams across studies or to identify the most important areas for intervention. To advance the science of team science, we provide recommendations regarding the development and psychometric testing of measures of collaboration quality and outcomes that can be replicated and broadly applied across studies.

Double-edged sword of interdisciplinary knowledge flow from hard sciences to humanities and social sciences: Evidence from China

Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS) increasingly absorb knowledge from Hard Sciences, i.e., Science, Technology, Agriculture and Medicine (STAM), as testified by a growing number of citations. However, whether citing more Hard Sciences brings more citations to HSS remains to be investigated. Based on China's HSS articles indexed by the Web of Science during 1998-2014, this paper estimated two-way fixed effects negative binomial models, with journal effects and year effects. Findings include: (1) An inverse U-shaped curve was observed between the percentage of STAM references to the HSS articles and the number of citations they received; (2) STAM contributed increasing knowledge to China's HSS, while Science and Technology knowledge contributed more citations to HSS articles. It is recommended that research policy should be adjusted to encourage HSS researchers to adequately integrate STAM knowledge when conducting interdisciplinary research, as over-cited STAM knowledge may jeopardize the readability of HSS articles.

Interdisciplinarity and impact: distinct effects of variety, balance, and disparity

Interdisciplinary research is increasingly recognized as the solution to today's challenging scientific and societal problems, but the relationship between interdisciplinary research and scientific impact is still unclear. This paper studies the association between the degree of interdisciplinarity and the number of citations at the paper level. Different from previous studies compositing various aspects of interdisciplinarity into a single indicator, we use factor analysis to uncover distinct dimensions of interdisciplinarity corresponding to variety, balance, and disparity. We estimate Poisson models with journal fixed effects and robust standard errors to analyze the divergent relationships between these three factors and citations. We find that long-term (13-year) citations (1) increase at an increasing rate with variety, (2) decrease with balance, and (3) increase at a decreasing rate with disparity. Furthermore, interdisciplinarity also affects the process of citation accumulation: (1) although variety and disparity have positive effects on long-term citations, they have negative effects on short-term (3-year) citations, and (2) although balance has a negative effect on long-term citations, its negative effect is insignificant in the short run. These findings have important implications for interdisciplinary research and science policy.