FW: [CHMINF-L] FW: physical distance between researchers influences the citedness of their papers K. Lee et al. PLoS ONE 5, e14279; 2010

[Eugene Garfield]

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From: CHEMICAL INFORMATION SOURCES DISCUSSION LIST
[mailto:CHMINF-L at LISTSERV.INDIANA.EDU] On Behalf Of Dana Roth
Sent: Thursday, December 23, 2010 12:42 AM
To: CHMINF-L at LISTSERV.INDIANA.EDU
Subject: [CHMINF-L] FW: physical distance between researchers influences
the citedness of their papers

Love Thy Lab Neighbour from Nature News

Anyone who has worked in a laboratory probably feels that having key
members of the group placed closer together makes for a better research
project. A study linking the proximity of investigators and the impact
of their research now backs up that hunch.

Isaac Kohane, co-director of the Harvard Medical School Center for
Biomedical Informatics in Boston, Massachusetts, decided to put
intuition to the test in 2005 after a debate with Harvard's dean of
administration, Richard Mills, over the layout of the centre. "I felt
this viscerally, but there was no hard evidence," says Kohane. He
enlisted more than a dozen undergraduates to identify 35,000 articles
published between 1999 and 2003 in biomedical sciences, each with at
least one Harvard author. It took the team two years to pinpoint where
individual Harvard investigators were working--right down to the level
of individual offices and laboratories.

The results, published in PLoS ONE last week (K. Lee et al. PLoS ONE 5,
e14279; 2010), show that the shorter the geographical distance between
first and last authors on a paper, the more highly cited were their
research papers. First authors often bear the brunt of the work, whereas
last authors tend to take the lead organizational role--and both are key
players in the research project. The distance trend was not found for
middle authors, who could be far removed from other collaborators
without any clear effect on research impact.

http://ow.ly/3t8sC


Dana L. Roth
Millikan Library / Caltech 1-32
1200 E. California Blvd. Pasadena, CA 91125
626-395-6423  fax 626-792-7540
dzrlib at library.caltech.edu
http://library.caltech.edu/collections/chemistry.htm