Understanding the assembly of interdisciplinary teams and its impact on performance

Alina Lungeanu*, Yun Huang, Noshir S. Contractor

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

76 Scopus citations

Abstract

Interdisciplinary teams are assembled in scientific research and are aimed at solving complex problems. Given their increasing importance, it is not surprising that considerable attention has been focused on processes of collaboration in interdisciplinary teams. Despite such efforts, we know less about the factors affecting the assembly of such teams in the first place. In this paper, we investigate the structure and the success of interdisciplinary scientific research teams. We examine the assembly factors using a sample of 1103 grant proposals submitted to two National Science Foundation interdisciplinary initiatives during a 3-year period, including both awarded and non-awarded proposals. The results indicate that individuals' likelihood of collaboration on a proposal is higher among those with longer tenure, lower institutional tier, lower H-index, and with higher levels of prior co-authorship and citation relationships. However, successful proposals have a little bit different relational patterns: individuals' likelihood of collaboration is higher among those with lower institutional tier, lower H-index, (female) gender, higher levels of prior co-authorship, but with lower levels of prior citation relationships.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)59-70
Number of pages12
JournalJournal of Informetrics
Volume8
Issue number1
DOIs
StatePublished - Jan 2014

Funding

This study was supported by the National Science Foundation (Grant Nos. CNS-1010904 , OCI-0904356 , and IIS-0838564 ) and National Institutes of Health (Grant Nos. UL1RR025741 and UL1DE019587 ). We would like to thank Ronald Burt, Roger Leenders, Paul Leonardi, Peter Monge, Willem Pieterson, and two anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments and suggestions.

Keywords

  • Citation network
  • Co-authorship network
  • Grant decision-making
  • Interdisciplinary collaboration
  • Social network analysis
  • Team assembly

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Library and Information Sciences
  • Computer Science Applications

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