Knowledge networks and knowledge creation among biomedical scientists

Abstract

The idea that scientific creativity is fostered when scientists work together and combine their knowledge stocks is well established in extant literature (He, Geng, & Campbell-Hunt, 2009; Rigby & Edler, 2005). The social capital perspective has provided valuable insights in exploring the effects of social interactions with others on the creation of knowledge. Although the benefits of social capital for the production of knowledge seems to be well grounded, studies examining the interplay between social network characteristics and individual features of scientists are few in number. To address this issue, our study conceives the scientists' network structure as a potential opportunity from which actors may benefit to a greater or lesser extent (Adler & Kwon, 2002), we advocate that the value of ties with others for the production of knowledge depends on the particular ability of each scientist as well as on the nature of knowledge that each particular scientist aims to produce. We use the biomedical research context to test these ideas. Our study performs a longitudinal analysis of the knowledge networks and knowledge production of 381 biomedical scientists along a 13 years period. We examined how network patterns are related to the scientific and technological knowledge of each scientist, showing that the predictive power of the scientist's social network is stepped up when individual contingencies are considered.