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446 To Stay or Not to Stay: Multidisciplinary Collaboration After NSF Funding

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 April 2023

S. Mohammed
Affiliation:
The Pennsylvania State University
B. Tirrell
Affiliation:
The Pennsylvania State University
C. Davis
Affiliation:
The Pennsylvania State University
T. Zhang
Affiliation:
The Pennsylvania State University
C. Basore
Affiliation:
The Pennsylvania State University
X. Liao
Affiliation:
The Pennsylvania State University
G. Miller
Affiliation:
The Pennsylvania State University
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Abstract

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OBJECTIVES/GOALS: NSF often requires cross-disciplinary team composition to be competitive for funding. To what extent do research teams have multidisciplinary authorships after they win an award, given that awards are not contracts? We examined the quantity and quality of multidisciplinary collaboration of NSF-funded teams before and after receiving their award. METHODS/STUDY POPULATION: Our sample was 150 PIs and Co-PIs (67% male) from 58 NSF-funded EAGER (EArly-concept Grants for Exploratory Research) grants between 2013 and 2019. Using publicly available information, we collected the number of conference papers, publications, and grants PIs/co-PIs produced with each other (all PIs and co-PIs in a team or a partial subset). Based on Ph.D. fields, we also cataloged whether the combination of PIs/co-PI authors on outputs represented unidisciplinary or multidisciplinary collaboration after their NSF award. Multidisciplinary collaboration consisted of multidivisional (Ph.D. disciplines across NSF divisions, e.g., political science and cognitive psychology) or multidirectorate (Ph.D. disciplines across NSF directorates, e.g., psychology and engineering) authorship. RESULTS/ANTICIPATED RESULTS: Of the 74% of PI and co-PI teams who collaborated after their EAGER award, almost 9 out of 10 chose to work with a collaborator from a different discipline, and almost 8 out of 10 chose to work with a researcher from an extremely diverse discipline from their own (e.g., computer science and psychology). Research on interdisciplinary teams largely emphasizes the challenges and problems they face but the current research demonstrated that 90% of the sample chose to continue working together across disciplines after EAGER awards. Therefore, future research should dedicate more attention to the nontangible benefits members receive in interdisciplinary teams. Moreover, quality measures revealed higher H-indices for multidisciplinary than unidisciplinary journals and conferences. DISCUSSION/SIGNIFICANCE: Our archival results revealed that NSF EAGER grants are having their intended effect of being a catalyst for 1) continued multidisciplinary (and especially multidirectorate) collaboration) and 2) high-quality multidisciplinary publication and conference output. These results have contributed to NSF policy changes to reinstate the EAGER grant.

Type
Team Science
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BYCreative Common License - NCCreative Common License - ND
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is unaltered and is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained for commercial re-use or in order to create a derivative work.
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2023. The Association for Clinical and Translational Science