A guide to Big Team Science creates a blueprint for research collaboration on a large scale

Science Daily  September 8, 2023 The past decade has witnessed a proliferation of big team science (BTS), endeavours where a comparatively large number of researchers pool their intellectual and/or material resources in pursuit of a common goal. Despite this burgeoning interest, there exists little guidance on how to create, manage and participate in these collaborations. An international team of researchers (USA- Stanford University, Canada) integrated insights from a multi-disciplinary set of BTS initiatives to provide a how-to guide for BTS. They addressed the initial considerations for launching a BTS project, such as building the team, identifying leadership, governance, tools, and […]

Non-native English speaking scientists work much harder just to keep up, global research reveals

Phys.org  July 22, 2023 An international team of researchers (Australia, USA – UC Berkeley, State University of Louisiana, Germany, Spain, Nepal, UK) surveyed 908 researchers in environmental sciences, to estimates and compare the amount of effort required to conduct scientific activities in English between researchers from different countries and, thus, different linguistic and economic backgrounds. Their survey demonstrated that non-native English speakers, especially early in their careers, spend more effort than native English speakers in conducting scientific activities, from reading and writing papers and preparing presentations in English, to disseminating research in multiple languages. Language barriers could cause them not […]

Examining morality and competition in science

Phys.org  May 31, 2023 A potential source of ambivalent empirical results on the same hypothesis is design heterogeneity—variation in true effect sizes across various reasonable experimental research protocols. An international team of researchers led by Austria invited independent research teams to contribute experimental designs to a crowd-sourced project. In a large-scale online data collection, 18,123 experimental participants were randomly allocated to 45 randomly selected experimental designs out of 95 submitted designs. They found a small adverse effect of competition on moral behavior in a meta-analysis of the pooled data. The crowd-sourced design of their study allowed for a clean identification […]

US skills gap rapidly widening, survey reveals

Phys.org  January 24, 2023 According to Wiley’s latest annual Closing the Skills Gap https://universityservices.wiley.com/closing-the-skills-gap-2023/?utm_source=press_release&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=skills_gap_2023 report companies are having an increasingly difficult time attracting and retaining workers who have the skills needed to fill their open jobs. Among 600 U.S. human resources professionals surveyed by Wiley, 69% said their organization has a skills gap, up from 55% in a similar survey in 2021. While some organizations address their skills gap by hiring new employees or using contractors, the majority say they try to upskill or reskill current employees to fill the gap. Those that lack the development initiatives and in-house resources […]

Nature’s 10 Ten people who helped shape science in 2022

Nature  December 14, 2022 A trail-blazing astronomer, a climate revolutionary and a transplant pioneer are some of the people behind this year’s big stories. The Nature’s 10 list explores key developments in science this year and some of the people who played important parts in these milestones. Along with their colleagues, these individuals helped to make amazing discoveries and brought attention to crucial issues. Nature’s 10 is not an award or a ranking. The selection is compiled by Nature’s editors to highlight key events in science through the compelling stories of those involved…read more.

Best of Last Year: The top Phys.org articles of 2022

Phys.org  December 9, 2022 It was a good year for research of all kinds as three men shared the Nobel Prize in physics for their work that showed that tiny particles separated from one another at great distances can be entangled. Alain Aspect, John Clauser and Anton Zeilinger won the award for their work showing that the counterintuitive field of quantum entanglement is real and demonstrable…read more.

Study: ‘Exploring’ inventors thrive in workplaces with open communications

Phys.org  October 12, 2022 Drawing upon the notion of boundaryless organizations and upon the information processing perspective of organizational design a team of researchers in the US (University of South Florida, University of Nebraska, University of Missouri) investigated the decompartmentalization of internal communication as a unique organizational context that moderates the relationship between R&D employees’ exploration behaviors and their individual inventive performance. They tested their hypotheses using a novel combination of survey and archival data. They found that R&D employees who explored more generated inventions that were more valuable only when in workplaces characterized by high communication decompartmentalization. Such workplaces […]

Tear down academic silos: Take an ‘undisciplinary’ approach

Phys.org  June 2, 2022 Interdisciplinary scholarship and education remain elusive at modern universities, despite efforts at both the individual and institutional levels. A team of researchers in the US (Cornell University, University of Wisconsin) has identified the main motivations that bring different disciplines together in joint research and some of the obstacles to that coming together. According to them instead of rallying around a specific mission, collaborating among disciplines effectively is much more about how to approach problems, finding a common way of interacting. Through unstructured workshops they found the choice of participants (who participates?), aspects of time (when do […]

Long-distance collaboration makes scientific breakthroughs more likely

Phys.org  May 31, 2022 Disruptive ideas and scientific breakthroughs are becoming increasingly rare and harder to find, with incremental discovery now more common than groundbreaking new findings. In an analysis of data for more than ten million research teams, across eleven academic fields from 1961 to 2020, researchers in the UK determined that over the past decade remote collaboration between academic teams has led to more scientific breakthroughs. This is a reversal of what was observed from the 1960s to the 2000s, when remote collaboration led to fewer scientific breakthroughs and more incremental innovation. New teams tend to create more […]

Are conferences worth time and money?

Phys.org  March 14, 2022 A team researchers in the US (Northwestern University, industry) developed a new mathematical model to understand and predict how scientists form collaborations at both in-person and virtual conferences. They validated the model with extensive data. The results suggest that the way organizers design conferences can have a direct effect on which scientific collaborations are formed and, by extension, on the direction of scientific inquiry. The patterns of interaction during conferences can be used to predict who will subsequently form a new collaboration, even when interaction is prescribed rather than freely chosen. After applying its mathematical model […]