A few observations from "The Science of Science", a useful review article appearing in this week's Science: http://barabasi.com/f/939.pdf
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The size of teams has increased over time. Black curves are for higher-impact papers, red curves for all papers.pic.twitter.com/tHXHnyI8Tj
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"A team-authored paper in science and engineering is 6.3 times more likely to receive 1000 or more citations..."pic.twitter.com/3q0Ph9SADD
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Interrupting this tweet stream to mention: it is _of course_ true that citations != quality of a paper. Not even close. Keep that in mind for all these facts! But the facts are still food for thought, IMO.
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This - diversity in team size (& everything else, frankly) - I thoroughly endorse. I'm all for chaotically trying everything...pic.twitter.com/RehKxNL30z
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Teams are growing, an average, 17% per decade. That's really not all that fast. It means a doubling time of about 44 years.
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Something I do wonder about in connection with the equal odds rule across a scientists' career: does it take into account the fact that in many fields citation rates are (I believe) rising? If so, the numbers should be rescaled.
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The probability density for a paper's number of citations, normalized by the average number of citations for its discipline. The is essentially identical across disciplines(!) This is honestly quite remarkable.pic.twitter.com/SQvHcmabee
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It's striking how much the paper focuses on citations and similar measures, but not on things like understanding, quality of explanations, deep new ideas, and so on; nor on economic impacts. Lots of proxy measures, rather than the reasons we want to do science in the first place
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Put another way, it's not so much about the science of science, as the science of the extremely limited set of things we can measure about science. Citations are not uninteresting, but there's a reason Boltzmann's grave has S = k log W on it, not his h-indexpic.twitter.com/RVhOGtTaEA
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Anyways, it's a useful survey paper, with much that was new to me in it. And it was fun to make a first pass over it "in public" like this
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End of conversation
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