Chatting around the water cooler may yield more than office gossip; it may help scientists produce better research, according to Harvard Medical School (HMS) investigators.
The benefits of collaboration are well accepted in the scientific world, but researchers with the HMS Center for Biomedical Informatics wondered whether physical proximity affects the quality of those collaborations: Do scientists who have more “face time” with colleagues produce higher-impact results? To test the hypothesis, they examined data from 35,000 biomedical science papers published between 1999 plus 2003, each with at least one Harvard author. The articles appeared in 2,000 journals plus involved 200,000 authors.
After analyzing the number of citations each paper generated (a standard way to gauge article quality) plus the distances between coauthors, they concluded that personal contact, especially between an article’s first plus last authors, still matters—even in an age of e-mail, social networking, plus video conferencing. (Their analysis, “Does Collocation Inform the Impact of Collaboration?” appeared in the online journal PLoS ONE in December.)
“Our data show that if the first plus last authors are physically close, they get cited more, on average,” says research assistant Kyungjoon Lee. As that distance grew, citations generally declined. (Typically, the first author is a graduate student or postdoctoral fellow plus the last is a more senior faculty member; they are often affiliated with the same lab, but do not necessarily work closely together.) The effect didn’t hold true for other author combinations, such as first plus third; in fact, the middle authors normally don’t interact much on a project, Lee notes. The team also found that, on average, a paper with four or fewer authors based in the same building was cited 45 percent more than one with authors in different buildings—“So if you put people who have the potential to collaborate close together,” he says, “it might lead to better results.”