This paper uses transaction-based data to provide new insights into the link between the geographic proximity of businesses and associated economic activity. It develops two new measures of, and a set of stylized facts about, the distances between observed transactions between customers and vendors for a research intensive sector. Spending on research inputs is more likely with businesses physically closer to universities than those further away. Firms supplying a university project in one year are more likely to subsequently open an establishment near that university. Vendors who have supplied a project, are subsequently more likely to be a vendor on the same or related project.

We identify two polar life cycles of scholarly creativity among Nobel laureate economists with Tinbergen falling broadly in the middle. Experimental innovators work inductively, accumulating knowledge from experience. Conceptual innovators work deductively, applying abstract principles. Innovators whose work is more conceptual do their most important work earlier in their careers than those whose work is more experimental. Our estimates imply that the probability that the most conceptual laureate publishes his single best work peaks at age 25 compared to the mid-50 s for the most experimental laureate. Thus, while experience benefits experimental innovators, newness to a field benefits conceptual innovators.

Countries, research institutions, and scholars are interested in identifying and promoting high-impact and transformative scientific research. This paper presents a novel set of text-and citation-based metrics that can be used to identify high-impact and transformative works. The 11 metrics can be grouped into seven types: Radical-Generative, Radical-Destructive, Risky, Multidisciplinary, Wide Impact, Growing Impact, and Impact (overall). The metrics are exemplified, validated, and compared using a set of 10,778,696 MEDLINE articles matched to the Science Citation Index Expanded (TM). Articles are grouped into six 5-year periods (spanning 1983-2012) using publication year and into 6,159 fields constructed using comparable MeSH terms, with which each article is tagged. The analysis is conducted at the level of a field-period pair, of which 15,051 have articles and are used in this study. A factor analysis shows that transformativeness and impact are positively related (rho = .402), but represent distinct phenomena. Looking at the subcomponents of transformativeness, there is no evidence that transformative work is adopted slowly or that the generation of important new concepts coincides with the obsolescence of existing concepts. We also find that the generation of important new concepts and highly cited work is more risky. Finally, supporting the validity of our metrics, we show that work that draws on a wider range of research fields is used more widely.

Conceptual novelty analysis data based on PubMed Medical Subject Headings ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Created by Shubhanshu Mishra, and Vetle I. Torvik on April 16th, 2018 ## Introduction This is a dataset created as part of the publication titled: Mishra S, Torvik VI. Quantifying Conceptual Novelty in the Biomedical Literature. D-Lib magazine : the magazine of the Digital Library Forum. 2016;22(9-10):10.1045/september2016-mishra. It contains final data generated as part of our experiments based on MEDLINE 2015 baseline and MeSH tree from 2015. The dataset is distributed in the form of the following tab separated text files: * PubMed2015_NoveltyData.tsv - Novelty scores for each paper in PubMed. The file contains 22,349,417 rows and 6 columns, as follow: - PMID: PubMed ID - Year: year of publication - TimeNovelty: time novelty score of the paper based on individual concepts (see paper) - VolumeNovelty: volume novelty score of the paper based on individual concepts (see paper) - PairTimeNovelty: time novelty score of the paper based on pair of concepts (see paper) - PairVolumeNovelty: volume novelty score of the paper based on pair of concepts (see paper) * mesh_scores.tsv - Temporal profiles for each MeSH term for all years. The file contains 1,102,831 rows and 5 columns, as follow: - MeshTerm: Name of the MeSH term - Year: year - AbsVal: Total publications with that MeSH term in the given year - TimeNovelty: age (in years since first publication) of MeSH term in the given year - VolumeNovelty: : age (in number of papers since first publication) of MeSH term in the given year * meshpair_scores.txt.gz (36 GB uncompressed) - Temporal profiles for each MeSH term for all years - Mesh1: Name of the first MeSH term (alphabetically sorted) - Mesh2: Name of the second MeSH term (alphabetically sorted) - Year: year - AbsVal: Total publications with that MeSH pair in the given year - TimeNovelty: age (in years since first publication) of MeSH pair in the given year - VolumeNovelty: : age (in number of papers since first publication) of MeSH pair in the given year * README.txt file ## Dataset creation This dataset was constructed using multiple datasets described in the following locations: * MEDLINE 2015 baseline: https://www.nlm.nih.gov/bsd/licensee/2015_stats/baseline_doc.html * MeSH tree 2015: ftp://nlmpubs.nlm.nih.gov/online/mesh/2015/meshtrees/ * Source code provided at: https://github.com/napsternxg/Novelty Note: The dataset is based on a snapshot of PubMed (which includes Medline and PubMed-not-Medline records) taken in the first week of October, 2016. Check here for information to get PubMed/MEDLINE, and NLMs data Terms and Conditions: Additional data related updates can be found at: Torvik Research Group ## Acknowledgments This work was made possible in part with funding to VIT from NIH grant P01AG039347 and NSF grant 1348742 . The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. ## License Conceptual novelty analysis data based on PubMed Medical Subject Headings by Shubhanshu Mishra, and Vetle Torvik is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at https://github.com/napsternxg/Novelty

Funding of research is critically important because it affects the flow of new, doctorally qualified scientists into the workforce. This paper provides new insights into how survey data can be combined with administrative records to examine the ways in which funding affects workforce decisions. We show that NSF supports more graduate students per dollar spent than other federal agencies. Not surprisingly, NIH heavily supports biology, health, and psychology PhDs, while NSF heavily supports PhDs in engineering, the physical sciences, mathematics, and computer science.

The science and engineering workforce has aged rapidly in recent years, both in absolute terms and relative to the workforce as a whole. This is a potential concern if the large number of older scientists crowds out younger scientists, making it difficult for them to establish independent careers. In addition, scientists are believed to be most creative earlier in their careers, so the aging of the workforce may slow the pace of scientific progress. We develop and simulate a demographic model, which shows that a substantial majority of recent aging is a result of the aging of the large baby boom cohort of scientists. However, changes in behavior have also played a significant role, in particular, a decline in the retirement rate of older scientists, induced in part by the elimination of mandatory retirement in universities in 1994. Furthermore, the age distribution of the scientific workforce is still adjusting. Current retirement rates and other determinants of employment in science imply a steady-state mean age 2.3 y higher than the 2008 level of 48.6.

In evaluating research investments, it is important to establish whether the expertise gained by researchers in conducting their projects propagates into the broader economy. For eight universities, it was possible to combine data from the UMETRICS project, which provided administrative records on graduate students supported by funded research, with data from the U.S. Census Bureau. The analysis covers 2010-2012 earnings and placement outcomes of people receiving doctorates in 2009-2011. Almost 40% of supported doctorate recipients, both federally and nonfederally funded, entered industry and, when they did, they disproportionately got jobs at large and high-wage establishments in high-tech and professional service industries. Although Ph.D. recipients spread nationally, there was also geographic clustering in employment near the universities that trained and employed the researchers. We also show large differences across fields in placement outcomes.