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The idea of Burden of Knowledge has been around for a long time.
Explicit scholarship of this idea has entered the mainstream with the works of Benjamin Jones (economist), in particular The Burden of Knowledge and the Death of the Renaissance Man, [1] and with the works of Jan Brendel and Sascha Schweitzer The Burden of Knowledge in Mathematics. [2]
Theory and empirical studies reflect the case that researchers and innovators are not born with the required expertise and must first undertake education. With accumulating information and discoveries, the time to digest and improve on extant knowledge takes longer. Similarly, frontiers of knowledge advance at an overall increasing rate and are shifting over time. The “burden of knowledge” refers to the difficulty of catching up with this evolving knowledge frontier.[ citation needed ]
A hard metric used by Brendel and Schweitzer for mathematics burden is age at first publication. They specifically point to "a significant increase of the average age of researchers at their first publication in one of our top-ranking journals." [2]
Findings associated with Burden of Knowledge investigations point to declining productivity in sole researchers and developers and increasing productivity by teams. [3] Prominent examples of highly effective team research in basic science include those of Nobel Prize awardees Francis Crick and James Watson's work on DNA structure, Yang Chen-Ning and Tsung-Dao Lee's work on parity violation, and Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman's mRNA vaccine discoveries and development )
Research also point to better outcomes in gender diverse teams. [4] Interestingly, research points to better development by large teams and more R&D novelty and disruption by small teams. [5]
Christian Turner (Professor of Law) uses the term BURDEN OF KNOWLEDGE in a different way, [6] referring to situations where one may be better off not knowing things, for example avoiding painful and uncomfortable details of ones health.
Challenges due to increasing complexity and data are found in other fields. There are observed productivity challenges in pharmaceutical drug discovery R&D. [7] The challenges also manifest in an overall trend of patents, papers, and discoveries being less disruptive. [8] [9]
A citation is a reference to a source. More precisely, a citation is an abbreviated alphanumeric expression embedded in the body of an intellectual work that denotes an entry in the bibliographic references section of the work for the purpose of acknowledging the relevance of the works of others to the topic of discussion at the spot where the citation appears.
Scientific citation is providing detailed reference in a scientific publication, typically a paper or book, to previous published communications which have a bearing on the subject of the new publication. The purpose of citations in original work is to allow readers of the paper to refer to cited work to assist them in judging the new work, source background information vital for future development, and acknowledge the contributions of earlier workers. Citations in, say, a review paper bring together many sources, often recent, in one place.
The h-index is an author-level metric that measures both the productivity and citation impact of the publications, initially used for an individual scientist or scholar. The h-index correlates with success indicators such as winning the Nobel Prize, being accepted for research fellowships and holding positions at top universities. The index is based on the set of the scientist's most cited papers and the number of citations that they have received in other publications. The index has more recently been applied to the productivity and impact of a scholarly journal as well as a group of scientists, such as a department or university or country. The index was suggested in 2005 by Jorge E. Hirsch, a physicist at UC San Diego, as a tool for determining theoretical physicists' relative quality and is sometimes called the Hirsch index or Hirsch number.
The Institute of Molecular Biotechnology (IMBA) is an independent biomedical research organisation founded by the Austrian Academy of Sciences in cooperation with the pharmaceutical company Boehringer Ingelheim. The institute employs around 250 people from over 40 countries, who perform basic research. IMBA is located at the Vienna BioCenter (VBC) and shares facilities and scientific training programs with the Gregor Mendel Institute of Molecular Plant Biology (GMI) of the Austrian Academy of Sciences and the Research Institute of Molecular Pathology (IMP), the basic research center of Boehringer Ingelheim.
The International Human Frontier Science Program Organization (HFSPO) is a non-profit organization, based in Strasbourg, France, that funds basic research in life sciences. The organization implements the Human Frontier Science Program (HFSP) and is supported by 14 countries and the European Commission. Shigekazu Nagata is the HFSPO President and Chair of the Board of Trustees since 2018.
The Denisovans or Denisova hominins(di-NEE-sə-və) are an extinct species or subspecies of archaic human that ranged across Asia during the Lower and Middle Paleolithic, and lived, based on current evidence, from 285 to 52 thousand years ago. Denisovans are known from few physical remains; consequently, most of what is known about them comes from DNA evidence. No formal species name has been established pending more complete fossil material.
The concept of team science is a field of scientific philosophy and methodology which advocates using cross-disciplinary collaboration from diverse scientific fields to solve present-day to day problems. The field encompasses conceptual and methodological strategies aimed at understanding and enhancing the processes and outcomes of collaborative, team-based research.
Research networking (RN) is about using tools to identify, locate and use research and scholarly information about people and resources. Research networking tools serve as knowledge management systems for the research enterprise. RN tools connect institution-level/enterprise systems, national research networks, publicly available research data, and restricted/proprietary data by harvesting information from disparate sources into compiled profiles for faculty, investigators, scholars, clinicians, community partners and facilities. RN tools facilitate collaboration and team science to address research challenges through the rapid discovery and recommendation of researchers, expertise and resources.
Metascience is the use of scientific methodology to study science itself. Metascience seeks to increase the quality of scientific research while reducing inefficiency. It is also known as "research on research" and "the science of science", as it uses research methods to study how research is done and find where improvements can be made. Metascience concerns itself with all fields of research and has been described as "a bird's eye view of science". In the words of John Ioannidis, "Science is the best thing that has happened to human beings ... but we can do it better."
A number of significant scientific events occurred in 2020.
Benjamin Felt Jones is an American economist and professor at the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University. Jones's research is mainly focused on innovation and economic development. He has worked as an economic advisor in the U.S. Treasury and the White House.
This is a list of several significant scientific events that occurred or were scheduled to occur in 2021.
Dashun Wang is a Professor of Management and Organizations at the Kellogg School of Management and the McCormick School of Engineering, at Northwestern University. In 2019, he became the Founding Director of the Center for Science of Science and Innovation (CSSI). He is also a core faculty member at the Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO) and an Adjunct Professor of Department of Physics, at Northeastern University. In 2023, he co-founded the Ryan Institute on Complexity. Wang is a recipient of the AFOSR Young Investigator award (2016) and Poets & Quants Best 40 Under 40 Professors (2019).
This timeline lists notable events in the history of research into senescence or biological aging, including the research and development of life extension methods, brain aging delay methods and rejuvenation.
Roberta Sinatra is an Italian scientist and associate professor at the IT University of Copenhagen. She is known for her work in network science and conducts research on quantifying success in science.
John Michael Jumper is an American senior research scientist at DeepMind Technologies. Jumper and his colleagues created AlphaFold, an artificial intelligence (AI) model to predict protein structures from their amino acid sequence with high accuracy. Jumper has stated that the AlphaFold team plans to release 100 million protein structures. The scientific journal Nature included Jumper as one of the ten "people who mattered" in science in their annual listing of Nature's 10 in 2021.
Nicolas H. Thomä is a German researcher, full professor at the EPFL School of Life Sciences and Director of the Paternot Chair for Cancer Research in Lausanne, Switzerland. He is a biochemist and structural biologist and a leading researcher in the fields of ubiquitin ligase biology and DNA repair.
Jan Steyaert is a Belgian bioengineer and molecular biologist. He started his career as an enzymologist but the Steyaertlab is best known for pioneering work on (engineered) nanobodies for applications in structural biology, omics and drug design. He is full professor and teaches biochemistry at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel and Director of the VIB-VUB Center for Structural Biology, one of the Research Centers of the Vlaams Instituut voor Biotechnologie (VIB). He was involved in the foundation of three spin-off companies: Ablynx, Biotalys, and Confo Therapeutics.
The following scientific events occurred in 2023.
Brian Uzzi is an American sociologist and the Richard L. Thomas Professor of Leadership at the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University. He is known for his work on problems in the fields of sociology, network science, the science of science, and complex systems. He is the co-director of the Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO), is a professor of sociology, and a professor of Industrial Engineering and Management Sciences at the McCormick School of Engineering. Since 2019, Uzzi has written a column for Forbes on Leadership and artificial intelligence.