Speaker:

Hao Peng, Postdoctoral Fellow, Kellogg School of Management and the Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems, Northwestern University

Title:

Necessity and Strategy for Facilitating Idea Adoption in Science

Abstract:

Science begins with the creation but thrives on the adoption of innovative ideas. This adoption process is important in most areas of science including funding, publishing, and the media. In this talk, I show the necessity to purposefully devise policies to promote the adoption of novel ideas because (1) the complex interdisciplinary structure revealed by journal embeddings poses challenges to research evaluation, (2) peer reviewers at top biology journals disrecognize novel research despite strong editorial preference, and (3) retracted papers have received more attention on different types of online platforms including news media. In terms of strategy, I show that (4) promotional language can help to communicate the merits of innovative ideas in grant applications as promotional words robustly predict (i) probability of funding, (ii) degree of novelty, and (iii) future citation impact. These findings suggest that the scientific community can judiciously leverage promotional language to aid the reception of big ideas in science.

Speaker Bio:

Hao Peng is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Kellogg School of Management. He works with Brian Uzzi at the Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems. His research is in computational social science, social networks, and innovation management. He studies the dissemination of innovation and workforce diversity in the innovation market. His research aims to understand how individuals and organizations, particularly those in the knowledge industry, can refine their human capital to accelerate discoveries and breakthroughs. Dr. Peng holds a PhD from University of Michigan School of Information and a BS in Information Management from Sun Yat-sen University in China.

Location:

In person: Chambers Hall, 600 Foster Street, Lower Level
Remote option: https://northwestern.zoom.us/j/91051755818
Passcode: NICO2024

About the Speaker Series:

Wednesdays@NICO is a vibrant weekly seminar series focusing broadly on the topics of complex systems and data science. It brings together attendees ranging from graduate students to senior faculty who span all of the schools across Northwestern, from applied math to sociology to biology and every discipline in-between. Please visit: https://bit.ly/WedatNICO for information on future speakers.

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