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August 24, 2009, 01:47 PM ET
Internet Seen as Leveling Opportunities for Scientists
The Internet has proved itself to be a democratizing force for a range of human endeavors, such as the simple act of selling a car or the complex task of shaming a repressive government. Could it also be leveling the playing field in scientific research?
A study led by Waverly W. Ding, an assistant professor of business at the University of California at Berkeley, suggests that it is.
For their research, Ms. Ding and colleagues at Georgia State University and the University of Missouri at St. Louis compared user data involving Bitnet, an Internet forerunner established by Yale University and the City University of New York, and the Domain Name System, which is the naming protocol currently used to identify addresses on the Internet.
Their findings, published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, are based on a random sample of 3,771 life scientists from 430 U.S. institutions over a 25-year period. The study's conclusion is that in all three groups that were examined -- female scientists, young scientists, and scientists at lower-ranked institutions -- researchers showed greater increases in publishing productivity attributable to their use of the Internet than did researchers outside their group.
“The gender and research tier results suggest that IT has been an equalizing force,” the authors write, “at least in terms of the number of publications and gain in co-authorship, enabling scientists outside the inner circle to participate more fully.”
Each day on Wired Campus, The Chronicle's technology reporters highlight key IT developments and put them in perspective.
Comments
1. johnwebb - August 24, 2009 at 06:26 pm
During that 25 year period, in the life sciences, both the page count of existing journals and the number of new journals increased significantly. If the authors did not control for this very large increase, their statistics are probably not very useful.
2. princeton67 - August 24, 2009 at 07:51 pm
The study's conclusion - that the Web is the cause - is a case of jumping to conclusions. The first and third paragraphs, using the word "Internet" thrice, indicates that (the Internet) was the only cause the researchers considered.
Perhaps the male biologists at the top-ranked institutions were, and are, already publishing at their maximum (given teaching and other responsibilities) rate - because that (publishing) = tenure. So, this group could not increase their productivity.
Also, Mr. Webb is on the $$: advances in computer sequencing DNA have vastly expanded the research possibilities in/of life sciences.
3. dank48 - August 25, 2009 at 08:43 am
So far, the study looks a lot more solid than the commentary.
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