The spatial and institutional factors of knowledge production at MIT

Academic research is increasingly cross-disciplinary and collaborative - around the globe and within institutions. In this context, what is the role and relevance of the campus? I examine the scholarly output and collaboration patterns of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as they pertain to its interrelated organizational structures, including institutional affiliation and spatial configuration, over a 10-year time span. There are four significant results: 1. diverging trends in the composition of collaborative teams over time (size, faculty versus non-faculty, etc.) between papers and patents; 2. patterns of cross-building and cross-disciplinary collaboration are substantively different between papers and patents; 3. a network topology and community structure that reveals spatial versus institutional collaboration trends; and 4. a persistent relationship between proximity and collaboration, well fit with an exponential decay model, that is consistent for papers, patents, and for specifically cross-disciplinary work. These insights contribute an architectural dimension to the field of scientometrics, taking a first step toward empirical foundations for applied institutional policy and spatial planning.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Urban Studies and Planning.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2016

Author dc:creator

• Claudel, Matthew (Matthew Christopher)

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Carlo Ratti and Fiona Murray.

• Urban Studies and Planning.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/105032

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/105032