The COVID-19 pandemic has necessitated social distancing at every level of society, including universities and research institutes, raising essential questions concerning the continuing importance of physical proximity for scientific and scholarly advance. Using customized author surveys about the intellectual influence of referenced work on scientist's own papers, combined with precise measures of geographic and semantic distances between focal and referenced works, we find that being at the same institution is strongly associated with intellectual influence on scientists' and scholars' published work. Yet, this influence increases with intellectual distance: the more different the referenced work done by colleagues at one's institution, the more influential it is on one's own. Universities worldwide constitute places where people doing very different work engage in sustained interactions through departments, committees, seminars and communities. These interactions come to uniquely influence their published research, suggesting the need to replace, rather than displace diverse engagements for sustainable advance.
翻译:COVID-19大流行使得社会各个阶层,包括大学和研究机构,都不得不进行社会疏远,提出了关于物理距离对于科学和学术进步的持续重要性的基本问题。利用针对科学家自己论文参考工作的知识影响的定制作者调查,加上对焦点和参考作品之间的地理和语义距离的精确测量,我们发现在同一机构与科学家和学者出版作品的知识影响密切相关。然而,这种影响随着知识距离的增加而增加:同事在某个机构所从事的参考工作越不同,对自身的影响也就越大。世界各地的大学都是从事不同工作的人通过部门、委员会、研讨会和社区进行持续互动的地方。这些互动对他们所出版的研究产生了独特的影响,表明需要取代而不是取代各种活动,以实现可持续进步。