Grant: "First who, then what: Network analytic methods for identifying new collaborations in psychology"

Special Collaborative Grant 20182.000 Euros
Finding potential collaborators is important, especially for early-career scientists (Kellogg, 2012). Good ones can produce rapid advances in a research program for only small investments of time and effort. And commercial publishers know this. For example, Elsevier’s SciVal offers a rudimentary means for evaluating potential scientific collaborations: the “Topics and Research Areas” report. However, such tools were not designed to be used specifically by psychologists. They do not take into account the semantics of psychological science: what the words used by psychologists mean to other psychologists. Combining our knowledge of psychology’s controlled vocabulary (Burman, in press-a; Burman, Green, & Shanker, 2015) and building and analyzing social networks (e.g., Burman, in press-b; Wiradhany & Baumgartner, in prep.), we plan to develop a psychology-specific networking tool. The network will be built in three layers: colleagues (as reflected in PURE), their main index terms (from PsycINFO), and the associated semantic relations (from the APA’s controlled vocabulary). The result will be a network of interests, and new collaborations will be highlighted through the overlapping of psychological terms. Additional analyses will then suggest natural intra-disciplinary groupings of the institute’s research staff: our “invisible colleges” (De Solla Price & Beaver, 1966). The resulting tool will then suggest new opportunities not only for future collaborative grant projects, but also for nascent research projects percolating invisibly within the Heymans Institute itself.