Diversity of Expertise is Key to Scientific Impact: a Large Scale Analysis in the Field of Computer Science

<strong>This repository is companion to a research paper with the following abstract:</strong> Understanding the relationship between the composition of a research team and the potential impact of their research papers is crucial as it can steer the development of new science policies for improving the research enterprise. Numerous studies assess how the characteristics and diversity of research teams can influence their performance across several dimensions: ethnicity, internationality, size, and others. In this paper, we explore the impact of diversity in terms of the authors’ expertise and skills. To this purpose, we retrieved 114K papers in the field of Computer Science and analysed how the diversity of research fields within a research team relates to the number of citations their papers received in the upcoming 5 years. The results show that two different metrics reflecting the diversity of expertise are directly associated with the number of citations. This suggests that, at least in Computer Science, diversity of expertise is key to scientific impact.本仓库与下述摘要对应的研究论文配套发布：厘清研究团队构成与其学术论文潜在影响力之间的关联至关重要，此类研究可为优化科研事业发展的新型科学政策制定提供指引。已有大量研究从种族、国际化程度、团队规模等多个维度，探讨了研究团队的特征与多样性对其科研表现的影响。本研究针对作者专业知识与技能维度的多样性所产生的影响展开探讨。为此，我们检索了计算机科学领域的11.4万篇学术论文，分析了研究团队内部的研究领域多样性与其论文在后续五年内的被引次数之间的关联。研究结果表明，两项用于衡量专业知识多样性的不同指标均与论文被引次数存在直接关联。这意味着至少在计算机科学领域中，专业知识多样性是提升科研影响力的关键因素。