Measuring diversity in disciplinary collaboration in research teams: An ecological perspective

2016-01-01
Aydınoğlu, Arsev Umur
Mitchell, Chad
This study proposes an alternative and complementary method to bibliometric analysis to measure disciplinary diversity in research teams. Shannon's entropy index, which is used in ecology to measure biodiversity in habitats, is adapted to measure disciplinary diversity of a research team (habitats become teams, and biodiversity becomes disciplinary diversity). Data come from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration Astrobiology Institute, which funded 14 interdisciplinary virtual research teams in 2012. Authors examined not only team rosters but also the project rosters (167 projects for 2012) of each team to calculate disciplinary diversity. Results suggest that the intended diversity is being achieved for some teams. However, for more than half of the teams, disciplinary diversity scores are lower on the project level compared to the overall team level, which suggests that for these teams, the intended diversity is not being achieved.
RESEARCH EVALUATION

Suggestions

Exploring Environmental Literacy through Demographic Variables
Öztürk, Gökhan; Yılmaz Tüzün, Özgül; Teksöz, Gaye (2013-01-01)
This study aims to investigate the effect of selected demographic variables on pre-service teachers’ environmental literacy. Although there are several demographic variables to have some degree of relationship with components of environmental literacy, gender, academic major, and grade level are chosen to investigate further in the Turkish context because of their prevalent usage in earlier studies. The sample of the study is comprised of 560 pre-service teachers enrolled in different academic majors. Envir...
The Challenges of International Computer-Supported Collaboration
Swigger, Kathleen; Alpaslan, Ferda Nur; Brazile, Robert; Harrington, Bryan (2004-10-23)
This paper discusses results of a study analyzing how cultural factors affect the performance of distributed collaborative learning teams. Participants in the study included computer science students from the University of North Texas and students from the Middle East Technical University in Ankara, Turkey. The results indicate that a team's cultural attributes are a significant predictor of its performance on programming projects. Cultural attributes most strongly correlated to group performance were those...
Hybrid ranking approaches based on data envelopment analysis and outranking relations
Eryılmaz, Utkan; Karasakal, Esra; Department of Industrial Engineering (2006)
In this study two different hybrid ranking approaches based on data envelopment analysis and outranking relations for ranking alternatives are proposed. Outranking relations are widely used in Multicriteria Decision Making (MCDM) for ranking the alternatives and appropriate in situations when we have limited information on the preference structure of the decision maker. Yet to apply these methods DM should provide exact values for method parameters (weights, thresholds etc.) as well as basic information suc...
Improving academic advising: a case study
Demir, Ayhan Gürbüz; Ok, Ahmet (Hacettepe Üniversitesi, 2001-01-01)
The purposeof this study was to investigate the proposals of advisors and students for improving academic advising. The 287 academic advisors and 735 students from different departments participated in this study. Students and academic advisors were asked to state their proposals on how to improve the effectiveness of the presentacademic advising system at METU. The proposals obtained from academic advisors and students were qualitatively analysed regardless of studentgrade level and academic advisors' depa...
Interactive Approaches to Multiple Criteria Sorting Problems: Entropy-Based Question Selection Methods
Özarslan, Ali; Karakaya, Gülşah (2022-08-01)
In this study, interactive approaches for sorting alternatives evaluated on multiple criteria are developed. The possible category ranges of alternatives are defined by mathematical models iteratively under the assumption that the preferences of the decision maker (DM) are consistent with an additive utility function. Simulation-based and model-based parameter generation methods are proposed to hypothetically assign the alternatives to categories. A practical approach to solve the incompatibility problem of...
Citation Formats
A. U. Aydınoğlu and C. Mitchell, “Measuring diversity in disciplinary collaboration in research teams: An ecological perspective,” RESEARCH EVALUATION, pp. 18–36, 2016, Accessed: 00, 2020. [Online]. Available: https://hdl.handle.net/11511/32132.