Diversity of Expertise is Key to Scientific Impact: a Large-Scale Analysis in the Field of Computer Science

TL;DR

This large-scale study in Computer Science demonstrates that teams with diverse expertise levels tend to produce more impactful research, as measured by citations within five years.

Contribution

The paper introduces two new metrics for measuring expertise diversity and establishes their significant correlation with research impact in Computer Science.

Findings

Expertise diversity metrics are significantly associated with higher citation counts.

Diverse research teams tend to produce more influential papers.

Study based on analysis of 114,000 papers in Computer Science.

Abstract

Understanding the relationship between the composition of a research team and the potential impact of their research papers is crucial as it can steer the development of new science policies for improving the research enterprise. Numerous studies assess how the characteristics and diversity of research teams can influence their performance across several dimensions: ethnicity, internationality, size, and others. In this paper, we explore the impact of diversity in terms of the authors' expertise. To this purpose, we retrieved 114K papers in the field of Computer Science and analysed how the diversity of research fields within a research team relates to the number of citations their papers received in the upcoming 5 years. The results show that two different metrics we defined, reflecting the diversity of expertise, are significantly associated with the number of citations. This suggests that, at least in Computer Science, diversity of expertise is key to scientific impact.