The University of Tokyo · Decision Sciences
Professor Sotaro Shibayama's research lab focuses on the dynamics of scientific innovation, creativity, and knowledge transfer within academic and entrepreneurial ecosystems. The lab investigates how individual and institutional factors—such as mentorship, scientific collaboration, and entrepreneurial engagement—affect the originality, novelty, and societal impact of research. Central themes include measuring scientific originality and novelty through citation and text analysis, understanding shifts in scientific norms due to academic entrepreneurship, and examining how PhD training environments shape future academic and entrepreneurial trajectories. The lab combines bibliometric, survey, and network analysis methods to explore the interplay between scientific behavior, innovation, and knowledge dissemination.
Figures are computed from collected data and may differ slightly.
Abstract Originality has self-evident importance for science, but objectively measuring originality poses a formidable challenge. We conceptualise originality as the degree to which a scientific discovery provides subsequent studies with unique knowledge that is not available from previous studies. Accordingly, we operationalise a new measure of originality for individual scientific papers building on the network betweenness centrality concept. Specifically, we measure the originality of a paper
Novelty is a core value in science, and a reliable measurement of novelty is crucial. This study proposes a new approach of measuring the novelty of scientific articles based on both citation data and text data. The proposed approach considers an article to be novel if it cites a combination of semantically distant references. To this end, we first assign a word embedding-a vector representation of each vocabulary-to each cited reference on the basis of text information included in the reference
This study uses a sample of Japanese university scientists in life and materials sciences to examine how academic entrepreneurship has affected the norms and behaviors of academic scientists regarding sharing scientific resources. Results indicate that high levels of academic entrepreneurship in a scientific field are associated with less reliance on the gift-giving form of sharing (i.e., generalized exchange) traditionally recommended by scientific communities, and with a greater emphasis on di
This paper examines mentorship as a mechanism for individuals to acquire and develop creativity. More specifically, we study the effect of mentor creativity on protégé creativity and how this effect is moderated by the mentoring styles of autonomy and exploration. Our empirical analysis focuses on formal PhD supervision and training, drawing on survey and bibliometric data for 143 life-science professors (mentors) and their 685 PhD students (protégés). We find that the effect of mentor creativit
Abstract This paper investigates how the characteristics of university laboratories influence the propensity of Ph.D. students to entrepreneurship, and thus, contribute to the transfer of academic knowledge to society. As determinants of Ph.D. entrepreneurship, we focus on the lab scientific and social capital as well as on the business experience that Ph.D. students acquire during their training period. The empirical exercise is based on questionnaire survey data of 5266 Ph.D. students in Itali
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 o
Ph.D. training in academic labs offers the foundation for the production of knowledge workers, indispensable for the modern knowledge-based society. Nonetheless, our understanding on Ph.D. training has been insufficient due to limited access to the inside of academic labs. Furthermore, early careers of Ph.D. graduates are often difficult to follow, which makes the evaluation of training effects challenging. To address these limitations, this study aims to illustrate the settings of Ph.D. trainin
Academic training is the initial step for junior scientists to learn to develop into independent scientists. This study investigates how supervisors decide to employ different approaches of early-career research training, and how these approaches influence the degree of trainees’ independence in their later careers. Drawing on survey and bibliometric data of life scientists in Japanese universities, this study presents the following findings. First, if scientists are allowed higher autonomy in u
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