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

This repository is companion to a research paper with the following 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 and skills. 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 reflecting the diversity of expertise are directly associated with the number of citations. This suggests that, at least in Computer Science, diversity of expertise is key to scientific impact