To have a successful career, one must learn from those that are at the top of their fields. This is especially important in the field of academic research, where who you collaborate with has a massive impact on your success and on the ideas you generate. When researchers collaborate on academic projects, they get creative inspiration from their collaborators, especially if their collaborators are highly influential/pioneers (academic superstars) in their fields. A study set up by Azoulay et al.’s showed that collaborators of academic superstars suffered in terms of citations, grant money, and so on when the academic superstars faced sudden death [1].
Granted that these academic superstars bring immense inspiration for all those who ‘follow’ them. But, is that the whole picture? Could there be detrimental effects such as the generation of redundant ideas among ‘the followers’ of the same superstar? According to Baten et al., when many people follow the same creative pioneers, ideas of ‘followers’ become highly similar and therefore, redundant [2, 3]. Through our project, we aim to explore this notion and see whether the ‘followers’ of an academic ‘superstar’ fall into the trap of redundant idea generation. If they do, we aim to explore to what extent the ideas are redundant. We hypothesize that while at an individual level, collaborating with academic superstars facilitates creative inspiration, at a collective level, these connections can introduce redundancies among the researchers’ work even when they collaborate independently with the superstar and have never worked with each other.
Inspired by Azoulay et al.’s work [1], we will first extract information about the 112 academic superstars including the title of their papers, abstracts of their papers, and the names of their collaborators. From that, we will then extract the titles and the abstracts of the papers written by the collaborators. Then through NLP, we will analyze the titles and the abstracts to see how similar the topics of research of collaborators are with the respective superstar, and also how similar they are to other collaborators of the same superstar. A high similarity index will show that there is redundancy in idea generation. We then aim to present our findings via data visualization. Our goal is to help people, especially academic researchers, be more conscious of where they get their creative inspiration from so that they can diversify their sources and thus have a more successful career.
[1] Azoulay, Pierre, Joshua S. Graff Zivin, and Jialan Wang. "Superstar Extinction." The Quarterly Journal of Economics 125.2 (2010): 549-589.
[2] R. A. Baten, D. Bagley, A. Tenesaca, F. Clark, J. P. Bagrow, G. Ghoshal, and M. E. Hoque, Creativity in temporal social networks: How divergent thinking is impacted by one's choice of peers, Journal of the Royal Society Interface, 17(171):20200667, October 2020
[3] Cox, S. R., Wang, Y., Abdul, A., von der Weth, C., & Lim, B. Y. (2021). Directed Diversity: Leveraging Language Embedding Distances for Collective Creativity in Crowd Ideation. arXiv preprint arXiv:2101.06030.