Choosing the Next Experiment: Gains and Losses for Scientists and Society

• In Event: 387 - Regular Session. Sociology of Science 2

Abstract

Career success and scientific progress are deeply influenced by scientists’ choice of research problems. Here we infer preferences in problem selection from patterns of published discovery. We represent research problems as links between scientific entities in a complex network. We then build a model of scientific discovery informed by qualitative research on the process of scientific problem selection, mapping salient features to key properties of this network: node degree and inter-node distance. We infer the typical research strategy in biomedical chemistry from 30 years of publications and patents and compare its efficiency with thousands of alternatives. Strategies of chemical discovery are similar in articles and patents, conservative in their neglect of low-degree, distant or disconnected chemicals, and efficient only for initial exploration of the network of chemical relationships. Through massive supercomputer experiments and analytical analyses we discover much more efficient strategies for maturing fields and show that publication of all experimental failures would substantially improve the speed of discovery.

Authors

• James A. Evans, University of Chicago

• Andrey Rzhetsky, University of Chicago

• Ian Foster, University of Chicago and Argonne National Lab