Want to Work Together? The Impact of Multi-University Collabortion

The Internet has broken down traditional barriers to scientific collaboration and made the entire world one great intellectual salon, right? Sort of, according to a recent analysis published in Science, but the relationship between improved digital communications, multi-university research teams, and the pecking order of institutions where scientists work is actually quite complicated. The findings could potentially shape thinking on where to direct R&D resources.

Without question, the report, which looked at 4.2 million papers published over three decades, “indicates a remarkable and nearly universal rise since 1975 in the frequency of collaborations between authors located at different universities.” But those collaborations aren’t necessarily happening between researchers located on opposite sides of the planet. Over the 30-year interval in question, the mean distance between collaborators in science and engineering fields grew from 750 miles to 800 miles. They conclude: “It is not the length of a scientist’s reach that has changed but rather the incidence of reaching across university boundaries.”

But the more interesting findings involve social distance rather than physical distance.

The data suggests that collaborations between researchers at different top-tier universities have a measurably larger impact than papers published by collaborators within a single top-tier school. For science and engineering fields, a cross-school study is about 6 percent more likely to be high impact than work published by colleagues on the same campus. In the social sciences, this probability increases to almost 12 percent.

The authors divide schools into four tiers and note that based on the number of schools in each tier, researchers at the top-flight institutions tend to work together more frequently than expected. Likewise for pairings that involve two schools in the fourth, or bottom, tier. While a same-tier pairing improves impact ratings for the first through third tiers, for a bottom-tier school, it can actually damage the probability of producing a high impact paper. “Partnership choice increasingly appears to be based on who the collaborators are rather than where they are,” the authors write, “with an emphasis on in-group status matching.”

The analysis leads them to conclude that while geography is measurably less important to doing high-impact research, social stratification actually helps increase the gravitational pull of already dominant academic centers.

Tags: Publishing

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