In scientific research, collaboration is one of the most effective ways to take advantage of new ideas, skills, and resources and for performing interdisciplinary research. Although collaboration networks have been intensively studied, the question of how individual scientists choose collaborators to study a new research topic remains almost unexplored. Here, we investigate the statistics and mechanisms of collaborations of individual scientists along their careers, revealing that, in general, collaborators are involved in significantly fewer topics than expected from a controlled surrogate. In particular, we find that highly productive scientists tend to have a higher fraction of single-topic collaborators, while highly cited—i.e., impactful—scientists have a higher fraction of multitopic collaborators. We also suggest a plausible mechanism for this distinction. Moreover, we investigate the cases where scientists involve existing collaborators in a new topic. We find that, compared to productive scientists, impactful scientists show strong preference of collaboration with high-impact scientists on a new topic. Finally, we validate our findings by investigating active scientists in different years and across different disciplines.

中文翻译：

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有影响力的科学家更倾向于让合作者参与新课题

在科学研究中，合作是利用新思想、技能和资源以及进行跨学科研究的最有效方式之一。尽管合作网络已得到深入研究，但科学家个人如何选择合作者来研究新研究课题的问题几乎仍未得到探索。在这里，我们调查了各个科学家在其职业生涯中合作的统计数据和机制，揭示了一般来说，合作者参与的主题比受控代理人预期的要少得多。特别是，我们发现高产科学家倾向于拥有更高比例的单一主题合作者，而高引用率（即有影响力）的科学家则拥有更高比例的多主题合作者。我们还为这种区分提出了一个合理的机制。此外，我们调查了科学家让现有合作者参与新主题的案例。我们发现，与富有成效的科学家相比，有影响力的科学家表现出强烈偏好与高影响力科学家就新主题进行合作。最后，我们通过调查不同年份和不同学科的活跃科学家来验证我们的发现。