Importance: Scientific writing is critical for successfully showing the merits of innovative ideas to funding agencies, colleagues, and practitioners, and it has evolved over time, particularly in the increased use of promotional words.
Objectives: To evaluate whether promotional language in biomedical grant writing is associated with receipt of funding and to assess who uses promotional language in their grant applications, after accounting for principal investigators (PIs), grants, and other confounders.
Design, Setting, And Participants: This cross-sectional study uses previously collected data on 2439 funded and rejected National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant applications from 2007 to 2019 and 9096 funded and rejected Novo Nordisk Foundation (NNF) biomedical grant applications from 2015 to 2022, bibliographic data on the publications of each PI from OpenAlex, and fixed-effects regression analysis.
The small but growing body of research on team vs. team competition focuses on predicting the winner based on multilevel factors, including the team's strength and prior relations among team members within a team. Our research demonstrates the significance and power of prior relations among members between competing teams in predicting the outcome of a contest.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFProtests involving brute force are growing in number and are viewed as a likely source of increased collective violence in industrialized nations. Yet, our scientific understanding of how violent protests are related to a leader's social media communications during protests remains nascent. Here, we analyse new data from the 6 January 'march on the US Capitol' to quantify the links between leadership, social media and levels of violence.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFProc Natl Acad Sci U S A
June 2024
How are the merits of innovative ideas communicated in science? Here, we conduct semantic analyses of grant application success with a focus on scientific promotional language, which may help to convey an innovative idea's originality and significance. Our analysis attempts to surmount the limitations of prior grant studies by examining the full text of tens of thousands of both funded and unfunded grants from three leading public and private funding agencies: the NIH, the NSF, and the Novo Nordisk Foundation, one of the world's largest private science funding foundations. We find a robust association between promotional language and the support and adoption of innovative ideas by funders and other scientists.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe advent of large-scale datasets that trace the workings of science has encouraged researchers from many different disciplinary backgrounds to turn scientific methods into science itself, cultivating a rapidly expanding 'science of science'. This Review considers this growing, multidisciplinary literature through the lens of data, measurement and empirical methods. We discuss the purposes, strengths and limitations of major empirical approaches, seeking to increase understanding of the field's diverse methodologies and expand researchers' toolkits.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFProc Natl Acad Sci U S A
February 2023
Conjecture about the weak replicability in social sciences has made scholars eager to quantify the scale and scope of replication failure for a discipline. Yet small-scale manual replication methods alone are ill-suited to deal with this big data problem. Here, we conduct a discipline-wide replication census in science.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFA large-scale study provides a causal test for a cornerstone of social science.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFProc Natl Acad Sci U S A
September 2022
How long will this article be remembered? How long will people reference it in their conversations, and for how many years will other authors cite its findings in their own works? A community's attention to a cultural object decays as time passes, a process known as collective forgetting. Recent work models this decay as the result of two different processes. One linked to communicative memory-memories sustained by human communication-and the other linked to cultural memory-memories sustained by the physical recording of content.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFFast growing scientific topics have famously been key harbingers of the new frontiers of science, yet, large-scale analyses of their genesis and impact are rare. We investigated one possible factor connected with a topic's extraordinary growth: scientific prizes. Our longitudinal analysis of nearly all recognized prizes worldwide and over 11,000 scientific topics from 19 disciplines indicates that topics associated with a scientific prize experience extraordinary growth in productivity, impact, and new entrants.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Growing evidence shows that scientific collaboration plays a crucial role in transformative innovation in the life sciences. For example, contemporary drug discovery and development reflects the work of teams of individuals from academic centers, the pharmaceutical industry, the regulatory science community, health care providers, and patients. However, public understanding of how collaborations between academia and industry catalyze novel target identification and first-in-class drug discovery is limited.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFEinstein believed that mentors are especially influential in a protégé's intellectual development, yet the link between mentorship and protégé success remains a mystery. We marshaled genealogical data on nearly 40,000 scientists who published 1,167,518 papers in biomedicine, chemistry, math, or physics between 1960 and 2017 to investigate the relationship between mentorship and protégé achievement. In our data, we find groupings of mentors with similar records and reputations who attracted protégés of similar talents and expected levels of professional success.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFProc Natl Acad Sci U S A
May 2020
Replicability tests of scientific papers show that the majority of papers fail replication. Moreover, failed papers circulate through the literature as quickly as replicating papers. This dynamic weakens the literature, raises research costs, and demonstrates the need for new approaches for estimating a study's replicability.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe ability to objectively assess academic performance is critical to rewarding academic merit, charting academic policy, and promoting science. Quintessential to performing these functions is first the ability to collect valid and current data through increasingly automated online interfaces. Moreover, it is crucial to remove disciplinary and other biases from these data, presenting them in ways that support insightful analysis at various levels.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAs terror groups proliferate and grow in sophistication, a major international concern is the development of scientific methods that explain and predict insurgent violence. Approaches to estimating a group's future lethality often require data on the group's capabilities and resources, but by the nature of the phenomenon, these data are intentionally concealed by the organizations themselves via encryption, the dark web, back-channel financing, and misinformation. Here, we present a statistical model for estimating a terror group's future lethality using latent-variable modeling techniques to infer a group's intrinsic capabilities and resources for inflicting harm.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPolarization affects many forms of social organization. A key issue focuses on which affective relationships are prone to change and how their change relates to performance. In this study, we analyze a financial institutional over a two-year period that employed 66 day traders, focusing on links between changes in affective relations and trading performance.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIn the version of this article initially published, errors occurred in the Acknowledgments.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFDebate over the impact of team composition on the outcome of a contest has attracted sports enthusiasts and sports scientists for years. A commonly held belief regarding team success is the superstar effect; that is, including more talent improves the performance of a team. However, studies of team sports have suggested that previous relations and shared experiences among team members improve the mutual understanding of individual habits, techniques and abilities and therefore enhance team coordination and strategy.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThis Research Letter examines differences in the size of National Institutes of Health (NIH) grants awarded to first-time male and female principal investigators at top research institutions, including the Big Ten and Ivy League universities.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFProc Natl Acad Sci U S A
February 2019
Many leaders today do not rise through the ranks but are recruited directly out of graduate programs into leadership positions. We use a quasi-experiment and instrumental-variable regression to understand the link between students' graduate school social networks and placement into leadership positions of varying levels of authority. Our data measure students' personal characteristics and academic performance, as well as their social network information drawn from 4.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFProc Natl Acad Sci U S A
December 2018
Scientific prizes confer credibility to persons, ideas, and disciplines, provide financial incentives, and promote community-building celebrations. We examine the growth dynamics and interlocking relationships found in the worldwide scientific prize network. We focus on understanding how the knowledge linkages among prizes and scientists' propensities for prizewinning relate to knowledge pathways between disciplines and stratification within disciplines.
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