Blind Matching Versus Matchmaking: Comparison Group Selection for Highly Creative Researchers

Atlanta Conference on Science and Innovation Policy 2009This presentation was part of the session : Other PapersThis material is presented to ensure timely dissemination of scholarly and technical work. Copyright and all rights therein are retained by authors or by other copyright holders. All persons copying this information are expected to adhere to the terms and constraints invoked by each author's copyright. In most cases, these works may not be reposted without the explicit permission of the copyright holder. ©2009 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or to reuse any copyrighted component of this work in other works must be obtained from the IEEE.This research examines approaches for constructing a comparison group relative to highly creative researchers in nanotechnology and human genetics in the US and Europe. Such a comparison group would be useful in identifying factors that contribute to scientific creativity in these emerging fields. Two comparison group development approaches are investigated. The first approach is based on propensity score analysis and the second is based on knowledge from the literature on scientific creativity and early career patterns. In the first approach, the log of citations over the years of activity in the domains under analysis produces a significant result, but the distribution of matches is not adequate at the middle and high ends of the scale. The second approach matches highly creative researchers in nanotechnology and human genetics with a comparison group of researchers that have the same or similar early career characteristics were considered: (1) same first year of publication (2) same subject category of the first publication, (3) similar publication volume for the first six years in the specified emerging domain. High levels of diversity among the highly creative researchers, especially those in human genetics, underscore the difficulties of constructing a comparison group to understand factors that have brought about their level of performance