Abstracts Category : Other

Measuring Intellectual Diversity in Groups, and Its Effects on Scientific Impact and Productivity

by Alexander Victor Graham

I answer questions regarding the relationship between the intellectual diversity of an individualscollaborations and their impact and productivity. I propose two new measures of intellectualdiversity coauthor diversity score and group intellectual diversity. Coauthor diversity scoremeasures how different an author is from their immediate collaborators. Group intellectual diversitymeasures how diverse a group is as a composite of each members difference to every other member.These measures allow me to test hypotheses regarding the relationship between intellectual diversityand career outcomes. I conduct two case studies, using data from the Web of Science database, toexamine the measures in biomechanical modelling and nanotechnology. I bootstrapped negativebinomial regressions with squared interaction terms for diversity measures to test for relationshipsbetween individual and group diversities against career citations. Increasing diversity is associatedwith more citations until an maximum after which citations exhibit negative returns as diversityincreases. This behaviour is consistent in both case studies. I use a bootstrapped linear regression toshow that individual and group diversities have a significant effect on publication rates inbiomechanical modelling, but not in nanotechnology.