Age and the Trying Out of New Ideas

Chatbots Vs. Human Experts: Evaluating Diagnostic Performance of Chatbots in Uveitis and the Perspectives on AI Adoption in Ophthalmology

PURPOSE

To assess the diagnostic performance of two chatbots, ChatGPT and Glass, in uveitis diagnosis compared to renowned uveitis specialists, and evaluate clinicians' perception about utilizing artificial intelligence (AI) in ophthalmology practice.

METHODS

Six cases were presented to uveitis experts, ChatGPT (version 3.5 and 4.0) and Glass 1.0, and diagnostic accuracy was analyzed. Additionally, a survey about the emotions, confidence in utilizing AI-based tools, and the likelihood of incorporating such tools in clinical practice was done.

RESULTS

Uveitis experts accurately diagnosed all cases (100%), while ChatGPT achieved a diagnostic success rate of 66% and Glass 1.0 achieved 33%. Most attendees felt excited or optimistic about utilizing AI in ophthalmology practice. Older age and high level of education were positively correlated with increased inclination to adopt AI-based tools.

CONCLUSIONS

ChatGPT demonstrated promising diagnostic capabilities in uveitis cases and ophthalmologist showed enthusiasm for the integration of AI into clinical practice.

Striking the right balance between youth and experience: An ageing scientific workforce could have unanticipated implications for innovation, creativity, and productivity

Should more research funding be directed towards scientists' peak years of creativity and productivity?

Publish or Perish: Selective Attrition as a Unifying Explanation for Patterns in Innovation over the Career

Studying 5.6 million biomedical science articles published over three decades, we reconcile conflicts in a longstanding interdisciplinary literature on scientists' life-cycle productivity by controlling for selective attrition and distinguishing between research quantity and quality. While research quality declines monotonically over the career, this decline is easily overlooked because higher "ability" authors have longer publishing careers. Our results have implications for broader questions of human capital accumulation over the career and federal research policies that shift funding to early-career researchers - while funding researchers at their most creative, these policies must be undertaken carefully because young researchers are less "able" on average.

Identify novel elements of knowledge with word embedding

As novelty is a core value in science, a reliable approach to measuring the novelty of scientific documents is critical. Previous novelty measures however had a few limitations. First, the majority of previous measures are based on recombinant novelty concept, attempting to identify a novel combination of knowledge elements, but insufficient effort has been made to identify a novel element itself (element novelty). Second, most previous measures are not validated, and it is unclear what aspect of newness is measured. Third, some of the previous measures can be computed only in certain scientific fields for technical constraints. This study thus aims to provide a validated and field-universal approach to computing element novelty. We drew on machine learning to develop a word embedding model, which allows us to extract semantic information from text data. Our validation analyses suggest that our word embedding model does convey semantic information. Based on the trained word embedding, we quantified the element novelty of a document by measuring its distance from the rest of the document universe. We then carried out a questionnaire survey to obtain self-reported novelty scores from 800 scientists. We found that our element novelty measure is significantly correlated with self-reported novelty in terms of discovering and identifying new phenomena, substances, molecules, etc. and that this correlation is observed across different scientific fields.

Generational differences in international research collaboration: A bibliometric study of Norwegian University staff

This paper addresses the relationship between age and international research collaboration. The main research question is: do younger researchers collaborate more internationally than their senior colleagues? A common assumption is that younger generations are generally more internationally oriented than older generations. On the other hand, senior researchers may have larger international networks compared to younger colleagues. The study is based on data for 5,600 Norwegian researchers and their publication output during a three-year period (44,000 publications). Two indicators for international collaboration are used: The share of researchers involved in international collaboration measured by co-authorship and the average proportion of publications with international collaboration per researcher. These indicators reflect two different dimensions of international collaboration. Although the findings are not consistent across age cohorts and indicators of internationalization, the overall trend is that international collaboration tends to decline with increasing age. This holds both at aggregate levels and within groups of academic positions. However, the generational differences are not very large, and other variables such as the field of research explain more of the differences observed at an individual level.

NIH funding and the pursuit of edge science

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) plays a critical role in funding scientific endeavors in biomedicine. Funding innovative science is an essential element of the NIH's mission, but many have questioned the NIH's ability to fulfill this aim. Based on an analysis of a comprehensive corpus of published biomedical research articles, we measure whether the NIH succeeds in funding work with novel ideas, which we term edge science. We find that edge science is more often NIH funded than less novel science, but with a delay. Papers that build on very recent ideas are NIH funded less often than are papers that build on ideas that have had a chance to mature for at least 7 y. We have three further findings. First, the tendency to fund edge science is mostly limited to basic science. Papers that build on novel clinical ideas are not more often NIH funded than are papers that build on well-established clinical knowledge. Second, novel papers tend to be NIH funded more often because there are more NIH-funded papers in innovative areas of investigation, rather than because the NIH funds innovative papers within research areas. Third, the NIH's tendency to have funded papers that build on the most recent advances has declined over time. In this regard, NIH funding has become more conservative despite initiatives to increase funding for innovative projects. Given our focus on published papers, the results reflect both the funding preferences of the NIH and the composition of the applications it receives.

Edge Factors: Scientific Frontier Positions of Nations

A key decision in scientific work is whether to build on novel or well-established ideas. Because exploiting new ideas is often harder than more conventional science, novel work can be especially dependent on interactions with colleagues, the training environment, and ready access to potential collaborators. Location may thus influence the tendency to pursue work that is close to the edge of the scientific frontier in the sense that it builds on recent ideas. We calculate for each nation its position relative to the edge of the scientific frontier by measuring its propensity to build on relatively new ideas in biomedical research. Text analysis of 20+ million publications shows that the United States and South Korea have the highest tendencies for novel science. China has become a leader in favoring newer ideas when working with basic science ideas and research tools, but is still slow to adopt new clinical ideas. Many locations remain far behind the leaders in terms of their tendency to work with novel ideas, indicating that the world is far from flat in this regard.