Assessing researcher interdisciplinarity: a case study of the University of Hawaii NASA Astrobiology Institute

Gowanlock, Michael; Gazan, Rich

doi:10.1007/s11192-012-0765-y

Cited by 22 publications

(18 citation statements)

References 29 publications

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“…To examine the effect of the interdisciplinarity within the research group, the present qualitative study used observations and descriptions of the conformation of the members (stakeholders), the specific objectives of each discipline, the subject categories involved, and the relationship between them. Those that were considered were scientific discipline boundaries that have been used in other studies as a measure of the degree of interdisciplinarity [4].…”

Section: Data Collectionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Many authors used the clustering of citation patterns [3]. Those bibliometric studies of interdisciplinarity were based on machine learning algorithms in an attempt to understand the fine-grained details of interdisciplinary research in big-data analysis [4]. However, those approaches do not always work when studying the formation of a research team in a real-life context.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Conformation of an Astrobiology Interdisciplinary Research Group: The “Team Killalab” Case Study

Quispe-Pilco

Rodriguez-Venturo

Cruz-Simbrón

et al. 2019

The 2nd International Electronic Conference on Geosciences

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The development of new technologies in recent years has highlighted interdisciplinarity as a tool to solve complex problems faced by scientists and engineers in research work. Worldwide, the area of space science, specifically astrobiology, has had more than 25 missions with high technological development and economic returns. However, the success of interdisciplinary teams requires collaboration, responsibility, and leadership on the part of all members to prioritize the main objectives of the research. Likewise, the formation of interdisciplinary teams can be affected because there is little information about the strategies and tools that recognize the opportunity for constant interaction between subjects from engineering and science. Using a known methodology based on other recent proposals, we include a description of the conformation and behavior of a research team and an analysis of interdisciplinarity through the interrelation and level of dependence of the existing subject categories in the “Killalab” team. In this research, we present the ensemble interdisciplinary group “Killalab” and its implications for the realization of astrobiological investigations.

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Section: Data Collectionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Conformation of an Astrobiology Interdisciplinary Research Group: The “Team Killalab” Case Study

Quispe-Pilco

Rodriguez-Venturo

Cruz-Simbrón

et al. 2019

The 2nd International Electronic Conference on Geosciences

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“…Those categories have been used in several previous studies of interdisciplinary constellations in various scientific contexts, where also the methodological problems inherent in using the WoS categories for classification of interdisciplinary research have been thoroughly discussed (e.g. Gowanlock and Gazan 2013;Porter and Rafols 2009;Small 2010). In spite of these problems, for reasons of simplicity and convenience, the categories are used here to create the exemplary visualization shown in figure 11, where all articles published in 2012, and all older articles cited in that year, are included.…”

Section: Qualifying Impactmentioning

confidence: 99%

Qualifying the performance evaluation of Big Science beyond productivity, impact and costs

Heidler

Hallonsten

2015

Scientometrics

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The use of quantitative performance measures to evaluate the productivity, impact and quality of research has spread to almost all parts of public R&D systems, including Big Science where traditional measures of technical reliability of instruments and user oversubscription have been joined by publication counts to assess scientific productivity. But such performance assessment has been shown to lead to absurdities, as the calculated average cost of single journal publications easily may reach hundreds of millions of dollars. In this article, the issue of productivity and impact is therefore further qualified by the use of additional measures such as the immediacy index as well as network analysis to evaluate qualitative aspects of the impact of contemporary Big Science labs. Connecting to previous work within what has been called "facilitymetrics", the article continues the search for relevant bibliometric measures of the performance of Big Science labs with the use of a case study of a recently opened facility that is advertised as contributing to "breakthrough" research, by using several more measures and thus qualifying the topic of performance evaluation in contemporary Big Science beyond simple counts of publications, citations, and costs.

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“…This work is part of the ongoing development of the Astrobiology Integrative Research Framework (AIRFrame) [1], a system [20,35,21,23] funded by the NASA Astrobiology Institute (NAI) that uses document analysis techniques to allow astrobiology researchers from diverse fields to identify the subset of publications relevant to their work, but which may have appeared in journals specialized for a different audience, as well as relevant concepts and researchers from outside their discipline. The goal of AIRFrame is to foster understanding across areas, and thereby catalyze interdisciplinary collaboration.…”

Section: Cscw and Interdisciplinaritymentioning

confidence: 99%

Unsupervised classification and visualization of unstructured text for the support of interdisciplinary collaboration

Miller

Gazan

Still

2014

Proceedings of the 17th ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work &Amp; Social Computing

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We present a computer supported tool for cooperative work in interdisciplinary fields, which we tested within the area of astrobiology. Our document classification and visualization system is fully automated and data driven, based on unsupervised learning algorithms and network visualization tools. A new feature selection algorithm was created to aid this process that indicates which words should be used for mutual information-based clustering. Our system can extract information about collaborations from unstructured databases with no meta-data and reveals structure that can aid the planning of collaborative research. We analyzed publications produced by researchers from NASA's Astrobiology Institute. We presented this analysis as a cultural probe and recorded reactions from researchers that indicated that our method can help scientists from different disciplines to work together. We have made an interactive version of our visualization and analysis available as a website for long-term use.

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Assessing researcher interdisciplinarity: a case study of the University of Hawaii NASA Astrobiology Institute

Cited by 22 publications

References 29 publications

Conformation of an Astrobiology Interdisciplinary Research Group: The “Team Killalab” Case Study

Conformation of an Astrobiology Interdisciplinary Research Group: The “Team Killalab” Case Study

Qualifying the performance evaluation of Big Science beyond productivity, impact and costs

Unsupervised classification and visualization of unstructured text for the support of interdisciplinary collaboration

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