Essays on Utilizing Data Analytics and Dynamic Modeling to Inform Complex Science and Innovation Policies

In many ways, science represents a complex system which involves technical, social, and economic aspects. An analysis of such a system requires employing and combining different methodological perspectives and incorporation of different sources of data. In this dissertation, we use a variety of methods to analyze large sets of data in order to examine the effects of various domestic and institutional factors on scientific activities. First, we evaluate how the contributions of behavioral and social sciences to studies of health have evolved over time. We use data analytics to conduct a textual analysis of more than 200,000 publications on the topic of HIV/AIDS. We find that the focus of the scientific community within the context of the same problem varies as the societal context of the problem changes. Specifically, we uncover that the focus on the behavioral and social aspects of HIV/AIDS has increased over time and varies in different countries. Further, we show that this variation is related to the mortality level that the disease causes in each country. Second, we investigate how different sources of funding affect the science enterprise differently. We use data analytics to analyze more than 60,000 papers published on the subject of specific diseases globally and highlight the role of philanthropic money in these domains. We find that philanthropies tend to have a more practical approach in health studies as compared with public funders. We further show that they are also concerned with the economic, policy related, social, and behavioral aspects of the diseases. We uncover that philanthropies tend to mix and combine approaches and contents supported both by public and private sources of funding for science. We further show that in doing so, philanthropies tend to be closer to the position held by the public sector in the context of health studies. Finally, we find that studies funded by philanthropies tend to receive higher citations, and hence have higher impact, in comparison to those funded by the public sector. Third, we study the effect of different schemes of funding distribution on the career of scientists. In this study, we develop a system dynamics model for analyzing a scientist's career under different funding and competition contexts. We investigate the characteristics of optimal strategies and also the equilibrium points for the cases of scientists competing for financial resources. We show that a policy to fund the best can lead scientists to spend more time on writing proposals, in order to secure funding, rather than writing papers. We find that when everyone receives funding (or have the same chance of receiving funding) the overall optimal payoff of the scientists reaches its highest level and at this optimum, scientists spend all their time on writing papers rather than writing proposals. Our analysis suggests that more egalitarian distributions of funding results in higher overall research output by scientists. We also find that luck plays an important role in the success of scientists. We show that following the optimal strategies do not guarantee success. Due to the stochastic nature of funding decisions, some will eventually fail. The failure is not due to scientists' faulty decisions, but rather simply due to their lack of luck.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph. D.

Level thesis:degree_level

doctoral

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Industrial and Systems Engineering

Department dc:contributor.department

Industrial and Systems Engineering

Grantor dc:publisher

Virginia Tech

Year dc:date.issued

2018

Author dc:creator

• Baghaei Lakeh, Arash

Chair dc:contributor.committeechair

• Ghaffarzadegan, Navid

Committee members dc:contributor.committeemember

• Kong, Zhenyu
• Kelly, Jason P.
• Vakili, Keyvan

• Science policy
• data analytics
• topic modeling
• system dynamics
• health studies
• behavioral and social sciences
• funding institutions
• science philanthropy
• science workforce

Statement dc:rights

• In Copyright

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/

Dc Identifier Other

vt_gsexam:15145

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:vtechworks.lib.vt.edu:10919/95009