One of the most universal trends in science and technology today is the growth of large teams in all areas, as solitary researchers and small teams diminish in prevalence
. Increases in team size ...have been attributed to the specialization of scientific activities
, improvements in communication technology
, or the complexity of modern problems that require interdisciplinary solutions
. This shift in team size raises the question of whether and how the character of the science and technology produced by large teams differs from that of small teams. Here we analyse more than 65 million papers, patents and software products that span the period 1954-2014, and demonstrate that across this period smaller teams have tended to disrupt science and technology with new ideas and opportunities, whereas larger teams have tended to develop existing ones. Work from larger teams builds on more-recent and popular developments, and attention to their work comes immediately. By contrast, contributions by smaller teams search more deeply into the past, are viewed as disruptive to science and technology and succeed further into the future-if at all. Observed differences between small and large teams are magnified for higher-impact work, with small teams known for disruptive work and large teams for developing work. Differences in topic and research design account for a small part of the relationship between team size and disruption; most of the effect occurs at the level of the individual, as people move between smaller and larger teams. These results demonstrate that both small and large teams are essential to a flourishing ecology of science and technology, and suggest that, to achieve this, science policies should aim to support a diversity of team sizes.
A series of tubes: The continuous manufacture of a finished drug product starting from chemical intermediates is reported. The continuous pilot‐scale plant used a novel route that incorporated many ...advantages of continuous‐flow processes to produce active pharmaceutical ingredients and the drug product in one integrated system.
More of the social world lives within electronic text than ever before, from collective activity on the web, social media, and instant messaging to online transactions, government intelligence, and ...digitized libraries. This supply of text has elicited demand for natural language processing and machine learning tools to filter, search, and translate text into valuable data. We survey some of the most exciting computational approaches to text analysis, highlighting both supervised methods that extend old theories to new data and unsupervised techniques that discover hidden regularities worth theorizing. We then review recent research that uses these tools to develop social insight by exploring (
a
) collective attention and reasoning through the content of communication; (
b
) social relationships through the process of communication; and (
c
) social states, roles, and moves identified through heterogeneous signals within communication. We highlight social questions for which these advances could offer powerful new insight.
The Geometry of Culture Kozlowski, Austin C.; Taddy, Matt; Evans, James A.
American sociological review,
10/2019, Letnik:
84, Številka:
5
Journal Article
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We argue word embedding models are a useful tool for the study of culture using a historical analysis of shared understandings of social class as an empirical case. Word embeddings represent semantic ...relations between words as relationships between vectors in a highdimensional space, specifying a relational model of meaning consistent with contemporary theories of culture. Dimensions induced by word differences (rich–poor) in these spaces correspond to dimensions of cultural meaning, and the projection of words onto these dimensions reflects widely shared associations, which we validate with surveys. Analyzing text from millions of books published over 100 years, we show that the markers of class continuously shifted amidst the economic transformations of the twentieth century, yet the basic cultural dimensions of class remained remarkably stable. The notable exception is education, which became tightly linked to affluence independent of its association with cultivated taste.
In many academic fields, the number of papers published each year has increased significantly over time. Policy measures aim to increase the quantity of scientists, research funding, and scientific ...output, which is measured by the number of papers produced. These quantitative metrics determine the career trajectories of scholars and evaluations of academic departments, institutions, and nations. Whether and how these increases in the numbers of scientists and papers translate into advances in knowledge is unclear, however. Here, we first lay out a theoretical argument for why too many papers published each year in a field can lead to stagnation rather than advance. The deluge of new papers may deprive reviewers and readers the cognitive slack required to fully recognize and understand novel ideas. Competition among many new ideas may prevent the gradual accumulation of focused attention on a promising new idea. Then, we show data supporting the predictions of this theory. When the number of papers published per year in a scientific field grows large, citations flow disproportionately to already well-cited papers; the list of most-cited papers ossifies; new papers are unlikely to ever become highly cited, and when they do, it is not through a gradual, cumulative process of attention gathering; and newly published papers become unlikely to disrupt existing work. These findings suggest that the progress of large scientific fields may be slowed, trapped in existing canon. Policy measures shifting how scientific work is produced, disseminated, consumed, and rewarded may be called for to push fields into new, more fertile areas of study.
The capital, operating, and overall costs of a dedicated continuous manufacturing process to synthesize an active pharmaceutical ingredient (API) and formulate it into tablets are estimated for a ...production scale of 2000 t of tablets per year, with raw material cost, production yield, and API loading varied over broad ranges. Costs are compared to batch production in a dedicated facility. Synthesis begins with a key organic intermediate three synthetic steps before the final API; results are given for key intermediate (KI) costs of $100 to $3000/kg, with drug loadings in the tablet of 10 and 50 wt %. The novel continuous process described here is being developed by an interdisciplinary team of 20 researchers. Since yields are not yet well-known, and continuous processes typically have better yields than batch ones, the overall yields of the continuous processes with recycling were set equal to that of the batch process. Without recycling, yields are 10% lower, but less equipment is required. The continuous process has not been built at large scale, so Wroth factors and other assumptions were used to estimate costs. Capital expenditures for continuous production were estimated to be 20 to 76% lower, depending on the drug loading, KI cost, and process chosen; operating expenditures were estimated to be between 40% lower and 9% higher. The novel continuous process with recycling coupled to a novel direct tablet formation process yields the best overall cost savings in each drug loading/KI price scenario: estimated savings range from 9 to 40%. Overall cost savings are also given assuming the yield in the continuous case is 10% above and 10% below that of the batch process. Even when yields in the continuous case are lower than in the batch case, savings can still be achieved because the labor, materials handling, CapEx, and other savings compensate.
What factors affect a scientist's choice of research problem? Qualitative research in the history and sociology of science suggests that this choice is patterned by an "essential tension" between ...productive tradition and risky innovation. We examine this tension through Bourdieu's field theory of science, and we explore it empirically by analyzing millions of biomedical abstracts from MEDLINE. We represent the evolving state of chemical knowledge with networks extracted from these abstracts. We then develop a typology of research strategies on these networks. Scientists can introduce novel chemicals and chemical relationships (innovation) or delve deeper into known ones (tradition). They can consolidate knowledge clusters or bridge them. The aggregate distribution of published strategies remains remarkably stable. High-risk innovation strategies are rare and reflect a growing focus on established knowledge. An innovative publication is more likely to achieve high impact than a conservative one, but the additional reward does not compensate for the risk of failing to publish. By studying prizewinners in biomedicine and chemistry, we show that occasional gambles for extraordinary impact are a compelling explanation for observed levels of risky innovation. Our analysis of the essential tension identifies institutional forces that sustain tradition and suggests policy interventions to foster innovation.
The increasing threat of climate change has created a pressing need for cities to lower their carbon footprints. Urban laboratories are emerging in numerous cities around the world as a strategy for ...local governments to partner with public and private property owners to reduce carbon emissions, while simultaneously stimulating economic growth. In this article, we use insights from laboratory studies to analyse the notion of urban laboratories as they relate to experimental governance, the carbonization agenda and the transition to low‐carbon economies. We present a case study of the Oxford Road corridor in Manchester in the UK that is emerging as a low‐carbon urban laboratory, with important policy implications for the city's future. The corridor is a bounded space where a public‐private partnership comprised of the City Council, two universities and other large property owners is redeveloping the physical infrastructure and installing monitoring equipment to create a recursive feedback loop intended to facilitate adaptive learning. This low‐carbon urban laboratory represents a classic sustainable development formula for coupling environmental protection with economic growth, using innovation and partnership as principal drivers. However, it also has significant implications in reworking the interplay of knowledge production and local governance, while reinforcing spatial differentiation and uneven participation in urban development.
Online journals promise to serve more information to more dispersed audiences and are more efficiently searched and recalled. But because they are used differently than print--scientists and scholars ...tend to search electronically and follow hyperlinks rather than browse or peruse--electronically available journals may portend an ironic change for science. Using a database of 34 million articles, their citations (1945 to 2005), and online availability (1998 to 2005), I show that as more journal issues came online, the articles referenced tended to be more recent, fewer journals and articles were cited, and more of those citations were to fewer journals and articles. The forced browsing of print archives may have stretched scientists and scholars to anchor findings deeply into past and present scholarship. Searching online is more efficient and following hyperlinks quickly puts researchers in touch with prevailing opinion, but this may accelerate consensus and narrow the range of findings and ideas built upon.
The queries entered into search engines register hundreds of millions of different searches by tourists, not only reflecting the trends of the searchers' preferences for travel products, but also ...offering a prediction of their future travel behavior. This study used web search query volume to predict visitor numbers for a popular tourist destination in China, and compared the predictive power of the search data of two different search engines, Google and Baidu. The study verified the co-integration relationship between search engine query data and visitor volumes to Hainan Province. Compared to the corresponding auto-regression moving average (ARMA) models, both types of search engine data helped to significantly decrease forecasting errors. However, Baidu data performed better due to its larger market share in China. The study demonstrated the value of search engine data, proposed a method for selecting predictive queries, and showed the locality of the data for forecasting tourism demand.
•Web search data help to improve visitor volume forecasting model accuracy.•Co-integration relationship between search data and visitor volume is verified.•Baidu data performs better than Google for predicting tourist activities in China.•Process to select key search queries for visitor volume prediction is proposed.
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