In The Changing Frontier, Adam B. Jaffe and Benjamin Jones bring together a group of prominent scholars to consider the changes in science and innovation in the ensuing decades. The contributors take on such topics as changes in the organization of scientific research, the geography of innovation, modes of entrepreneurship, and the structure of research institutions and linkages between science and innovation. An important analysis of where science stands today, The Changing Frontier will be invaluable to practitioners and policy makers alike.
In The Changing Frontier, Adam B. Jaffe and Benjamin Jones bring together a group of prominent scholars to consider the changes in science and innovation in the ensuing decades. The contributors take on such topics as changes in the organization of scientific research, the geography of innovation, modes of entrepreneurship, and the structure of research institutions and linkages between science and innovation. An important analysis of where science stands today, The Changing Frontier will be invaluable to practitioners and policy makers alike.
The Changing Frontier: Rethinking Science and Innovation Policy
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The Changing Frontier: Rethinking Science and Innovation Policy
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In The Changing Frontier, Adam B. Jaffe and Benjamin Jones bring together a group of prominent scholars to consider the changes in science and innovation in the ensuing decades. The contributors take on such topics as changes in the organization of scientific research, the geography of innovation, modes of entrepreneurship, and the structure of research institutions and linkages between science and innovation. An important analysis of where science stands today, The Changing Frontier will be invaluable to practitioners and policy makers alike.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780226286860 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Chicago Press |
| Publication date: | 08/24/2015 |
| Series: | National Bureau of Economic Research Conference Report |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 440 |
| File size: | 25 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
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The Changing Frontier
Rethinking Science and Innovation Policy
By Adam B. Jaffe, Benjamin F. Jones
The University of Chicago Press
Copyright © 2015 National Bureau of Economic ResearchAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-28686-0
CHAPTER 1
Why and Wherefore of Increased Scientific Collaboration
Richard B. Freeman, Ina Ganguli, and Raviv Murciano-Goroff
Scientists increasingly collaborate on research with other scientists, producing an upward trend in the numbers of authors on a paper (Jones, Wuchty, and Uzzi 2008; Wuchty, Jones, and Uzzi 2007; Adams et al. 2005). Papers with larger numbers of authors garner more citations and are more likely to be published in journals with high impact factors than papers with fewer authors (Lawani 1986; Katz and Hicks 1997; deB. Beaver 2004; Wuchty, Jones, and Uzzi 2007; Freeman and Huang 2014), which seems to justify increased collaborations in terms of scientific productivity. The trend in coauthorship extends across country lines, with a larger proportion of papers coauthored by scientists from different countries (National Science Board 2012; Adams 2013). In the United States and other advanced economies, the proportion of papers with international coauthors increased from the 1990s through the first decade of the twenty-first century, while the proportion of papers with domestic coauthors stabilized. In emerging economies, where collaboration has not yet reached the proportions in the United States and other advanced countries, the share of papers with domestic collaborations and the share with international collaborations have both increased.
The spread of scientific workers and research and development activity around the world (Freeman 2010) has facilitated the increase in international collaborations. The growing number of science and engineering PhDs in developing countries, some of whom are international students and postdocs returning to their country of origins (Scellato, Franzoni, and Stephan 2012) has expanded the supply of potential collaborators outside the North American and Western European research centers. A rising trend in government and industry research and development (R&D) spending in developing countries and grant policies by the European Union and other countries favor international cooperation. At the same time, the lower cost of travel and communication has reduced the cost of collaborating with persons across geographic locales (Agrawal and Goldfarb 2008; Catalini, Fons-Rosen, and Gaulé 2014). The increased presence of China in scientific research, exemplified by China's move from a modest producer of scientific papers to number two in scientific publications after the United States, has been associated with huge increases in collaborations between Chinese scientists and those in other countries.
Finally, the location of scientific equipment and materials, such as the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN)'s Large Hadron Collider, huge telescopes in particular areas, or geological or climatological data available only in special localities, have also increased collaborations. The United States was not a prime funder for CERN, but Americans are the largest group of scientists and engineers working at CERN. China eschewed joining the CERN initiative as an associate member state, but many China-born scientists and engineers work at CERN as members of research teams from other countries.
How successful are collaborations across country lines and across locations in the same country? How do collaborators meet and develop successful research projects? What are the main advantages and challenges in collaborative research?
To answer these questions, we combine data from a 2012 survey that we conducted of corresponding authors on collaborations with at least one US coauthor with bibliometric data from Web of Science (WoS) (Thomson Reuters 2012) in three growing fields — particle and field physics, nanoscience and nanotechnology, and biotechnology and applied microbiology. The survey data allow us to investigate the connections among coauthors in collaborations and the views of corresponding authors about collaborations. The WoS data allows us to examine patterns of collaborations over time and to compare patterns found in our fields to those found in scientific publications broadly. To determine whether borders or space are the primary factors that affects the nature and impact of collaborations, we contrast collaborations across locations in the United States, collaborations in the same city in the United States, and collaborations with international researchers.
We find that US collaborations increased across US cities as well as internationally and that scientists involved in these collaborations and those who collaborate in the same locale report broad similarities in their experiences. Most collaborators first met while working in the same institution. Most say that face-to-face meetings are important in communicating with coauthors across distances. And most say that specialized knowledge and skills of co-authors drive their collaborations. We find that international collaborations have a statistically significant higher citation rate than domestic collaborations only in biotech, a modestly higher citation rate in particle physics, but a lower rate in nanotech. Because international collaborations have a greater number of authors than other collaborations, once we account for the number of coauthors on papers, the higher citation rate for biotech and particle physics international collaborations also disappear. Our results suggest that the benefits to international collaboration in terms of citations depend on the scientific field in question, rather than from any "international magic" operating on collaborations with the same number of researchers. By limiting our sample to papers with at least one US-based author, however, we exclude the possibility that international collaborations greatly benefit researchers in countries with smaller research communities by linking them to experts outside their country, the United States aside.
1.1 The Growing Trend of International Collaboration
We analyze data from corresponding authors and articles in which researchers collaborate in particle and field physics, nanoscience and nanotechnology, and biotechnology and applied microbiology. These three fields cover a wide span of scientific activity, with different research tools and methodologies.
Particle physics has a theoretical part and an empirical part. Leading edge empirical research requires massive investments in accelerators and colliders, of which the Large Hadron Collider is the most striking. Europe's decision to fund the Hadron Collider while the United States' rejection to build a large collider in Texas shifted the geographic locus of empirical research from the United States to Europe and arguably spurred the greater growth of string theory (which does not need direct access to the Collider) in the United States than in Europe. Particle physics is the most mathematically and theoretically sophisticated of the sciences we study, where pathbreaking mathematical analysis guides empirical work, and where the massive equipment exemplifies big science.
Nanotechnology is a general interdisciplinary applied technology, where engineers often collaborate with material scientists. The electron microscope is a pivotal research tool. The United States made sizable investments in nanotechnology beginning at the turn of the twenty-first century, when President Clinton called for greater investment in nano-related science and technology. This led to the 21st Century Nanotechnology Research and Development Act that President Bush signed in 2003. Other countries undertook similar initiatives in the same period.
Biotechnology is lab-based, in which the National Institutes of Health (NIH) dominates basic research funding, but where big pharmaceutical firms also fund considerable research. The most important change in biotech research technology has been the US-sponsored Human Genome Project and associated new methods of genetic analysis and engineering that allow labs around the world to modify the biological underpinnings of living creatures to advance medicine and improve biological products and processes.
To measure collaboration patterns in the three fields, we use publication data from the WoS. We identified all papers in the WoS database from 1990–2010, with at least one US coauthor in journal subject categories particle and field physics; nanoscience and nanotechnology; and biotechnology and applied microbiology. From these papers, we identify teams by the names of coauthors and locate the authors by author affiliations. This sample includes 125,808 papers.
Using the location of the authors on each paper, we define four types of collaborations:
US-only collaborations, divided into US colocated, in which all US authors are in the same city; US non-colocated, in which US coauthors are in at least two different cities; international collaborations, divided into international/US colocated, in which US coauthors are in the same city with at least one foreign coauthor; and international/US non-colocated, in which US coauthors are in two or more cities with at least one foreign coauthor.
Distinguishing between these forms of collaborations allows us to identify differences between papers with international collaborations and papers with collaborations in different locations, whether they are in the United States or overseas, as well as between papers with collaborations across locations within the United States. By focusing only on papers in which there is some US presence, our analysis may not generalize to papers written in which all authors are based outside the United States; by differentiating city location only for US coauthors, our findings do not address the potential effects of colocation or non-colocation of non-US-based researchers on paper outcomes.
Figure 1.1 displays the proportion of papers in our four categories and the proportion with single authors in the three fields taken together in each year. The solid top line gives the share of papers in which a US-based author collaborates solely with authors colocated in the same city. It shows a marked decrease in collaborations between these authors from 1990 through 2000, which then stabilizes at about 40 percent of papers. The line labeled Solo shows the proportion of papers that are solo authored. It drops from 20 percent to about 5 percent from 1990 to 2010. The line for International/US Colocated papers gives the share of papers for which at least one of the authors is in another country while all US authors are in the same city. It increases by 18 percentage points from 1990 to 2010. The line for International/US non-colocated increases by about 5 percentage points from 1990 to 2010. Most of the increase in international collaborations was between US scientists based in one location and persons in another country. Overall, while papers with authors in different US cities increased less than international collaborations, the data shows that increased geographic scope of collaborations involved more than crossing national boundaries.
To see whether the trend in collaborations varied noticeably among fields, figures 1.2A, 1.2B, and 1.2C display the proportion of papers by collaboration type for the three fields separately. The data for particle physics in figure 1.2A show the highest level of international collaborations, due presumably to the importance of particle accelerators and other equipment that are available at only some sites. Figures 1.2B and 1.2C show that in nano and biotech, the most common form of collaborations are US-colocated teams, while international/US-colocated collaborations are the second most common and US non-colocated collaborations are third in frequency. International collaborations were roughly as common as US non-colocated collaborations in nano and biotech until late in the first decade of the twenty-first century, when international collaborations increased sharply. In all fields, the proportion of papers by sole researchers and by researchers collaborating in the same city falls.
The increase in international collaborations in our three fields resembles the patterns in National Science Board (2012) and in Adams (2013) for science more broadly. Similarly, the increased geographic dispersion of coauthorship in our fields reflects the pattern in science more broadly in the United States as well.
1.2 Survey of Corresponding Authors
To go beyond bibliometric data on collaborations, in August 2012 we conducted an online survey of the corresponding authors of papers published in 2004, 2007, and 2010 in the Web of Science nano, biotech, and particle physics subject categories with at least one US coauthor. We identified unique corresponding authors based on e-mail addresses in these categories and selected one paper for each author, randomly choosing the paper from authors who had more than one paper in the database. Using the e-mail address of the corresponding author, we sent a personalized e-mail in English that invited them to complete the survey by clicking a link that connected them to the online survey instrument. If a paper had more than one corresponding author, we selected the one that appeared first. We sent two follow-up e-mail reminders in August and September 2012. We used Qualtrics Survey Software and respondents accessed it from the Qualtrics server.
We customized each survey to ask the respondent about the specific collaboration and individual team members. The survey had twenty-five questions and was designed so that respondents could complete it in ten to fifteen minutes. The questions sought to discover how the team formed, how it communicated and interacted during the collaboration, the contribution of each coauthor, types of research funding, and the advantages and disadvantages of working with the team. The survey also included an open-ended question for respondents to make comments. Several respondents sent e-mails with additional thoughts and information about the collaboration.
Between August 13, 2012, and August 20, 2012, we e-mailed a total of 19,836 individuals. Since some e-mail addresses had expired, changed, or some individuals were deceased, the number of individuals who received the e-mail is lower. We received 3,925 responses, which implies a response rate of 20 percent — a proportion that is in line with other surveys of scientists (Sauermann and Roach 2013). For individuals who published their papers in the most recent year of our survey (2010), the response rate was 26 percent. Taking account of the proportion of e-mails that likely did not reach respondents, we estimate approximately 29 percent of recipients of e-mails answered them.
The survey asked the respondent which country each coauthor was "primarily based in during the research and writing" of the article. This gives us a more accurate measure of whether teams are international than in the WoS data, which are based on author affiliations at the time of publication, which can differ from those during the work either because affiliations change between the time of the research and the time of publication, or because some people have multicountry affiliations.
Table 1.1 compares the characteristics of collaborations in the papers we analyze to those in the full sample of WoS papers and those in the 2004, 2007, and 2010 WoS sample from which we drew the survey. Our final sample includes 3,452 respondents, which is lower in part than the returned responses due to the fact that some papers with US addresses on the publication did not meet our requirement that at least one author be primarily based in the United States at the time of the research. Our analysis uses the respondents' information to define US colocated, US non-colocated, and international teams. The column giving the difference between the distribution of our sample in column (3) and the distribution of the WoS sample in column (2) shows that our survey sample is overrepresented by US colocated teams, the more recent publication year (2010), and publications from biotechnology.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Changing Frontier by Adam B. Jaffe, Benjamin F. Jones. Copyright © 2015 National Bureau of Economic Research. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.
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Table of Contents
Preface
Introduction
Adam B. Jaffe and Benjamin F. Jones
I. The Organization of Scientific Research
1. Why and Wherefore of Increased Scientific Collaboration
Richard B. Freeman, Ina Ganguli, and Raviv Murciano- Goroff
2. The (Changing) Knowledge Production Function: Evidence from the MIT Department of Biology for 1970‒2000 49
Annamaria Conti and Christopher C. Liu
3. Collaboration, Stars, and the Changing Organization of Science: Evidence from Evolutionary Biology
Ajay Agrawal, John McHale, and Alexander Oettl
Comment: Julia Lane
4. Credit History: The Changing Nature of Scientific Credit
Joshua S. Gans and Fiona Murray
II. The Geography of Innovation
5. The Rise of International Coinvention
Lee Branstetter, Guangwei Li, and Francisco Veloso
6. Information Technology and the Distribution of Inventive Activity
Chris Forman, Avi Goldfarb, and Shane Greenstein
III. Entrepreneurship and Market- Based Innovation
7. Innovation and Entrepreneurship in Renewable Energy
Ramana Nanda, Ken Younge, and Lee Fleming
8. Economic Value Creation in Mobile Applications
Timothy F. Bresnahan, Jason P. Davis, and Pai- Ling Yin
9. State Science Policy Experiments
Maryann Feldman and Lauren Lanahan
IV. Historical Perspectives on Science Institutions and Paradigms
10. The Endless Frontier: Reaping What Bush Sowed?
Paula Stephan
Comment: Bruce A. Weinberg
11. Algorithms and the Changing Frontier
Hezekiah Agwara, Philip Auerswald, and Brian Higginbotham
Comment: Timothy Simcoe
Contributors
Author Index
Subject Index