Nature paper: Interdisciplinary research has consistently lower funding success

 See http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v534/n7609/full/nature18315.html

"...we show that the greater the degree of interdisciplinarity, the lower the probability of being funded. The negative impact of interdisciplinarity is significant even when number of collaborators, primary research field and type of institution are taken into account."

x axis is the proportion of applications funded (Australian research council) and the y-axis is the estimated bias towards interdisciplinary proposals (estimated using a logit regression model).

Environmental, physical, social science and economics were (unsurprisingly) most averse to interdisciplinary proposals.

Repost: Why publishing negative findings is hard

From retraction watch, the story of a professor who tried to submit his reanalysis of two papers to journals and the obstacles he faced.

At: http://retractionwatch.com/2016/02/17/why-publishing-negative-findings-is-hard/

Abstract of Paper: Job Insecurity in Academic Research Employment: An Agent-Based Model

Abstract:

This paper presents an agent-based model of fixed-term academic employment in a competitive research funding environment.  The goal of the model is to investigate the effects of job insecurity on research productivity.  Agents may be either established academics who may apply for grants, or postdoctoral researchers who are unable to apply for grants and experience hardship when reaching the end of their fixed-term contracts.  Results show that in general adding fixed-term postdocs to the system produces less total research output than adding half as many permanent academics.  An in-depth sensitivity analysis is performed across postdoc scenarios, and indicates that promoting more postdocs into permanent positions produces significant increases in research output.

More details at:  https://drericsilverman.wordpress.com/2016/03/03/paper-submitted-to-alife-xv/

Network analysis paper: Weaving the fabric of science: Dynamic network models of science's unfolding structure

Weaving the fabric of science: Dynamic network models of science's unfolding structure

By Feng Shi, Jacob G. Foster, and James A. Evans

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Highlights

• Our hypergraph framework captures the multi-mode, higher-order complexity of science.

• Our random walk model powerfully predicts how science evolves.

• Our approach reveals intriguing modal dispositions behind the advance of science.

• We find that entities of one type typically connect through entities of another type.

• We find a special bridging role for methods and chemicals in the fabric of science.

• We find that adding more node types leads to superlinear improvements in prediction.

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Abstract

Science is a complex system. Building on Latour's actor network theory, we model published science as a dynamic hypergraph and explore how this fabric provides a substrate for future scientific discovery. Using millions of abstracts from MEDLINE, we show that the network distance between biomedical things (i.e., people, methods, diseases, chemicals) is surprisingly small. We then show how science moves from questions answered in one year to problems investigated in the next through a weighted random walk model. Our analysis reveals intriguing modal dispositions in the way biomedical science evolves: methods play a bridging role and things of one type connect through things of another. This has the methodological implication that adding more node types to network models of science and other creative domains will likely lead to a superlinear increase in prediction and understanding.

Keywords

Link prediction; Hypergraphs; Random walks; Multi-mode networks; Science studies; Metaknowledge

Paper (open access) available at: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378873315000118

Modelling academic research funding as a resource allocation problem

OK this is 5 years old but I have only just come accross it. From 2010 but modified 2014.

Geard, Nicholas and Noble, Jason (2010) Modelling academic research funding as a resource allocation problem. In, 3rd World Congress on Social Simulation, University of Kassel, Germany, 06 - 09 Sep 2010. (Submitted). 

Abstract:

Academic research funding is allocated through a competitive bidding process that may lead to inefficiency as excessive time is spent on proposal writing. We develop a simple agent-based model of the process and find that current systems are indeed likely to be inefficient. Alternative allocation schemes involving either a cap on individual effort or appraisal from the centre are indicated as improvements.

For code and paper see:  http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/271374/

New publications on peer reivew

Casnici N., Grimaldo F., Gilbert N. and Squazzoni F. (2015) Attitudes of referees in a multidisciplinary journal: An empirical analysis, JASIST (Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology), forthcoming

Bianchi F. and Squazzoni F. (2015) Is Three Better Than One? Simulating the Effect of Multiple Reviewer Selection on the Quality and Efficiency of Peer Review, Ylmaz et al. (Eds), Proceedings of the 2015 Winter Simulation Conference

Cowley S. (2015) How peer review constrains cognition: on the frontline in the knowledge sector, Frontiers in Psychology http://www.peere.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/Cowley2015Frontiers.pdf)

Nedić O. and Dekanski A. (2015) A survey on publishing policies of the Journal of the Serbian Chemical Society – On the occasion of the 80th volume, The Journal of the Serbian Chemical Society, 959-969, 2015

Caram L.F., Caiafa C. F., Ausloos,M. and Proto A. N. (2015) Cooperative peer-to-peer multiagent-based systems, Physical Review E, E 92, 022805 http://journals.aps.org/pre/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevE.92.022805

Huutoniemi K. (2015) Interdisciplinarity as Academic Accountability: Prospects for Quality Control Across Disciplinary Boundaries, Social Epistemology A Journal of Knowledge, Culture and Policy (DOI:10.1080/02691728.2015.

1015061) http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02691728.2015.1015061

As collected by the PEERE COST action.

Paper: Reviewer Fatigue? Why Scholars Decline to Review their Peers’ Work

This paper reports the results of a survey of academics about their attitudes and experiences of peer review.

Reviewer Fatigue? Why Scholars Decline to Review their Peers’ Work

Marijke Breuning^a1, Jeremy Backstrom^a2, Jeremy Brannon^a1, Benjamin Isaak Gross^a1 and Michael Widmeier^a1

^a1 University of North Texas
^a2 National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and the Responses to Terrorism (START)

ABSTRACT

As new academic journals have emerged in political science and existing journals experience increasing submission rates, editors are concerned that scholars experience “reviewer fatigue.” Editors often assume that an overload of requests to review makes scholars less willing to perform the anonymous yet time-consuming tasks associated with reviewing manuscripts. To date, there has not been a systematic investigation of the reasons why scholars decline to review. We empirically investigated the rate at which scholars accept or decline to review, as well as the reasons they gave for declining. We found that reviewer fatigue is only one of several reasons why scholars decline to review. The evidence suggests that scholars are willing to review but that they also lead busy professional and personal lives.

The paper is at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S1049096515000827