An exploration of collaborative scientific production at MIT through spatial organization and institutional affiliation
Name
journal.pone.0179334.pdf
Size
5.59 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
21afe044b7341dcb4392eead70fb823c
Author(s)
Claudel, Matthew
Massaro, Emanuele
Santi, Paolo
Murray, Fiona E
Ratti, Carlo
Date Issued
June 2017
Journal
PLOS ONE
Publisher
Public Library of Science (PLoS)
Citation
Claudel, Matthew et al. “An Exploration of Collaborative Scientific Production at MIT through Spatial Organization and Institutional Affiliation.” Edited by Igor Linkov. PLOS ONE 12, 6 (June 2017): e0179334 © 2017 Claudel et al
Version
Final published version
Abstract
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Academic research is increasingly cross-disciplinary and collaborative, between and within institutions. In this context, what is the role and relevance of an individual’s spatial position on a campus? We examine the collaboration patterns of faculty at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, through their academic output (papers and patents), and their organizational structures (institutional affiliation and spatial configuration) over a 10-year time span. An initial comparison of output types reveals: 1. diverging trends in the composition of collaborative teams over time (size, faculty versus non-faculty, etc.); and 2. substantively different patterns of cross-building and cross-disciplinary collaboration. We then construct a multi-layered network of authors, and find two significant features of collaboration on campus: 1. a network topology and community structure that reveals spatial versus institutional collaboration bias; and 2. a persistent relationship between proximity and collaboration, well fit with an exponential decay model. This relationship is consistent for both papers and patents, and present also in exclusively cross-disciplinary work. These insights contribute an architectural dimension to the field of scientometrics, and take a first step toward empirical space-planning policy that supports collaboration within institutions.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Urban Studies and Planning
Sloan School of Management
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1371/JOURNAL.PONE.0179334
