2 Innovative organizational forms have been designed to promote epistemic integration, ranging from constant co-location of researchers in specifically designed centers or campuses to large-scale networks, such as the European Framework Programmes and COST networks, which bring researchers together over space and time ( Biancani et al., 2014, Hackett and Parker, 2016 Barringer et al., n.d. 1 Hopes that interdisciplinary research would arise unassisted through natural processes of random variation and selective retention (Campbell, 1960), consilience ( Wilson, 1998), or convergence ( Sharp, 2011) have given way to interventions that create organizations and processes to foster interdisciplinary collaboration (see Palmer et al., 2016). Interdisciplinary research, widely heralded as a way to solve complex societal problems and to produce deeply original, even transformative, scientific knowledge, has been pursued and promoted for decades by scientists and science policymakers ( National Academy of Sciences 2005 Porter et al., 2006 National Academy of Sciences 2014 Frodeman et al., 2010). We conclude by suggesting social processes within collaborations that might account for the observed effects, by inviting further exploration of what this novel textual analysis approach might reveal about interdisciplinary research, and by offering some practical implications of our results. Controlling for the size and heterogeneity of collaborative groups, synthesis center origins and diversity measures significantly influence the visibility of publications, as indicated by citation measures.
The influence of synthesis center origins on aspects of diversity is only partly mediated by the size and heterogeneity of collaborations: when taking into account the numbers of authors, distinct institutions, and references, synthesis center origins retain a significant direct effect on diversity measures. Synthesis center publications have greater topical variety and evenness, but less disparity, than do papers in the reference corpus. Topical diversity was operationalized and measured in several ways, both to reflect aggregate diversity and to emphasize particular aspects of diversity (such as variety, evenness, and balance).
But no one has asked if synthesis working groups synthesize: are their publications substantially more diverse than others, and if so, in what ways and with what effect? We investigate these questions by using Latent Dirichlet Analysis to compare the topical diversity of papers published by synthesis center collaborations with that of papers in a reference corpus. Synthesis working groups are a distinctive form of scientific collaboration that produce consequential, high-impact publications. Synthesis centers are a form of scientific organization that catalyzes and supports research that integrates diverse theories, methods and data across spatial or temporal scales to increase the generality, parsimony, applicability, or empirical soundness of scientific explanations.
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