<b>COMPLEX SYSTEMS SEMINAR</b><br>Modeling Science Across Multiple Scales: From Individuals to Institutions

Quantitative measures are becoming increasingly prevalent at all scales of scientific evaluation: from countries, to universities, departments, laboratories, and individuals, and even knowledge itself. This is largely due to the advent of large comprehensive publication databases that allow for detailed studies of ideas, people, and institutions, and the vast networks connecting them.

In the first half of this talk, I will give an overview of the ‘science of science’, a research domain that addresses problems from economics, research policy, management, sociology, and complexity science perspectives. In particular, I will discuss the evolution of research careers based upon quantitative studies using longitudinal publication data, focusing on two mechanisms the drive career growth in science — reputation and collaboration.

In the second half of this talk, I will discuss what millions of patents and publications can tell us about the evolution of Europe’s integrated innovation system — the ‘European Research Area' (ERA) — which is a cross-border labor, funding, and mobility scheme aimed at fostering innovation and growth within Europe. Using econometric methods applied to R&D networks, we performed a comparative network analysis across time and between EU and non-EU countries to determine the “treatment effect” resulting from EU R&D integration policies. Using non-EU countries as the global baseline (control), and by analyzing cross-border -vs- intra-border collaborations as a second comparison group, our Difference-in-Difference-in-Difference strategy indicates that, despite decades of efforts to build an efficient and competitive ERA, there has been little cross-border integration in the EU above global trends —  in other words, Europe remains a collection of national innovation systems. And finally, I will discuss recent results indicating that ‘brain drain’ of high-skilled labor following the 2004 EU enlargement (by 12 countries, e.g. Poland, Estonia, Romania, etc.) may largely explain why the cross-border integration of R&D within the ERA is lagging.