García-Peña Carmen, Gutiérrez-Robledo Luis Miguel, Cabrera-Becerril Augusto, Fajardo-Ortiz David
National Institute of Geriatrics, Mexico City, Mexico.
Facultad de Ciencias, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Mexico, Mexico City, Mexico.
Scientifica (Cairo). 2019 Mar 3;2019:9127657. doi: 10.1155/2019/9127657. eCollection 2019.
Mexico's National Institute of Geriatrics (INGER) is the national research center of reference for matters related to human aging. INGER scientists perform basic, clinical, and demographic research which may imply different scientific cultures working together in the same specialized institution. In this paper, by a combination of text mining, coauthorship network analysis, and agent-based modeling, we analyzed and modeled the team assembly practices and the structure of the knowledge produced by scientists from INGER. Our results showed a weak connection between basic and clinical research and the emergence of a highly connected academic leadership. Importantly, basic and clinical-demographic researchers exhibited different team assembly strategies: basic researchers tended to form larger teams mainly with external collaborators, while clinical and demographic researchers formed smaller teams that very often incorporated internal (INGER) collaborators. We showed how these two different ways to form research teams impacted the organization of knowledge produced at INGER. Following these observations, we modeled, via agent-based modeling, the coexistence of different scientific cultures (basic and clinical research) exhibiting different team assembly strategies in the same institution. Three virtual experiments were run in our agent-based model. The three experiments kept similar values to the collaborating dynamics of INGER in terms of average team size and probabilities of choosing incumbents and external collaborators. The only difference among these experiments was the value of homophily defined as the trend to collaborate with research studies from the same field (14% corresponding to the 46% and 79%). The main result of these experiments is that by modulating just one variable (homophily), we could successfully reproduce the current situation of INGER (homophily of 79%) and simulate alternative scenarios in which interdisciplinary (46%) and transdisciplinary (14%) research could be done.
墨西哥国立老年医学研究所（INGER）是全国人类衰老相关事务的参考研究中心。INGER的科学家开展基础、临床和人口统计学研究，这可能意味着不同的科学文化在同一专业机构中协同工作。在本文中，我们通过文本挖掘、合著网络分析和基于主体的建模相结合的方法，对INGER科学家的团队组建实践和所产生知识的结构进行了分析和建模。我们的结果表明基础研究与临床研究之间的联系较弱，且出现了一个高度关联的学术领导层。重要的是，基础研究人员和临床 - 人口统计学研究人员表现出不同的团队组建策略：基础研究人员倾向于主要与外部合作者组建更大的团队，而临床和人口统计学研究人员组建的团队较小，且经常纳入内部（INGER）合作者。我们展示了这两种不同的研究团队组建方式如何影响INGER所产生知识的组织。基于这些观察结果，我们通过基于主体的建模，对在同一机构中展现不同团队组建策略的不同科学文化（基础研究和临床研究）的共存情况进行了建模。在我们基于主体的模型中进行了三个虚拟实验。这三个实验在平均团队规模以及选择现有成员和外部合作者的概率方面保持与INGER的合作动态相似的值。这些实验之间唯一的差异是同质性的值，同质性定义为与同一领域研究合作的趋势（分别对应46%和79%的同质性为14%）。这些实验的主要结果是，通过仅调节一个变量（同质性），我们能够成功再现INGER的当前情况（同质性为79%），并模拟可以进行跨学科（46%）和跨领域（14%）研究的替代情景。
