[论文解读] Expertise diversity of teams predicts originality and long-term impact in science and technology

Weihua Li, Hongwei Zheng|arXiv (Cornell University)|Oct 10, 2022

Innovation Policy and R&D被引用 8

一句话总结

本研究提出了一种新颖的专长距离度量方法，利用出版物和引文数据量化研究团队中先前职业相关的学科多样性。研究发现，专长多样性更高的团队能产出更具原创性的成果，并在长期（10年引用）产生显著更大的影响力，尤其在其他多样性维度缺失时更为明显，尽管短期影响力并无显著差异。

ABSTRACT

Despite the growing importance of teams in producing innovative and high-impact science and technology, it remains unclear how expertise diversity among team members relates to the originality and impact of the work they produce. Here, we develop a new method to quantify the expertise distance of researchers based on their prior career histories and apply it to 23 million scientific publications and 4 million patents. We find that across science and technology, expertise-diverse teams tend to produce work with greater originality. Teams with more diverse expertise have no significant impact advantage in the short- (2 years) or mid-term (5 years). Instead, they exhibit substantially higher long-term impact (10 years), increasingly attracting larger cross-disciplinary influence. This impact premium of expertise diversity among team members becomes especially pronounced when other dimensions of team diversity are missing, as teams within the same institution or country appear to disproportionately reap the benefits of expertise diversity. While gender-diverse teams have relatively higher impact on average, teams with varied levels of gender diversity all seem to benefit from increased expertise diversity. Given the growing knowledge demands on individual researchers, implementation of incentives for original research, and the tradeoffs between short-term and long-term impacts, these results may have implications for funding, assembling, and retaining teams with originality and long-lasting impacts.

研究动机与目标

• 开发一种量化研究团队先前专长多样性的方法，同时考虑学科间的关联性。
• 探究专长多样性如何影响科技工作的原创性与长期影响力。
• 评估专长多样性是否在短期表现之外持续带来影响力优势。
• 考察专长多样性与其他团队多样性维度（如性别、国籍和机构隶属关系）的相互作用。
• 通过识别专长多样性最有效推动高影响力创新的情境，为资助和团队组建策略提供建议。

提出的方法

• 专长距离度量基于科学领域之间的累积引用向量，根据引文模式归一化为单位向量。
• 使用领域对之间余弦距离矩阵 M 计算领域层面的余弦相似性，以反映学科间的关联性。
• 通过作者在各领域内的出版物数量构建其专长向量，并利用领域相似性矩阵对向量进行归一化处理，使其长度为单位长度。
• 两位作者 i 和 j 之间的专长距离计算公式为 d_ij = √(2 - 2q_i·q_j)，其中点积 q_i·q_j 由领域相似性矩阵 M 加权。
• 合作者的专长距离基于合作当年及之前的所有出版物估算，排除发表论文少于5篇的作者。
• 仅包含至少两名高产作者（≥5篇论文）的团队论文，最终分析了1100万篇论文和100万项专利。

Figure 1: Illustrating the estimation of expertise distance among team members and its correlation with multidisciplinarity. ( A ) We first indicate the prior career histories of two authors $1$ and $2$ , distributed across three research fields $1$ , $2$ , and $3$ . Then we display the expertise ve

实验结果

研究问题

• RQ1 团队成员先前的专长多样性如何与科技产出的原创性相关？
• RQ2 专长多样性是否带来更高的短期（2年）、中期（5年）或长期（10年）影响力？
• RQ3 专长多样性如何与其他团队多样性维度（如性别、国籍和机构隶属关系）相互作用？
• RQ4 当其他多样性维度（如机构或国家多样性）缺失时，专长多样性的影响力优势是否更为显著？
• RQ5 专长多样性在多大程度上可预测随时间推移的跨学科影响力？

主要发现

• 专长多样的团队产出的成果具有显著更高的原创性，其衡量依据为引文模式与跨学科新颖性。
• 尽管在短期（2年）和中期（5年）无显著影响力优势，但专长多样的团队在长期（10年引用）表现出显著更高的影响力。
• 随着时间推移，高专长多样性的团队日益吸引跨学科影响，表明其科学影响力范围更广。
• 当其他多样性维度（如机构或国家多样性）缺失时，专长多样性的影响力优势最为显著。
• 性别多样的团队平均影响力更高，但所有性别多样的团队均因更高的专长多样性而获益，表明存在叠加效应。
• 专长距离度量能有效关联多个学术多样性指标，且优于忽略学科关联性的简单度量方法。

Figure 2: Originality and its correlation with expertise diversity of teams and multidisciplinarity of the teams’ work. We present the interplay between expertise diversity of teams and disruption of the teams’ work, and find that high expertise diversity is correlated with high disruption score for