Category: Research

I was reading through Paula Stephan’s How Economics Shapes Science – which is, by the way, an utterly fantastic book for anyone who wants to understand how universities actually work – when I came across this interesting little table. Average Number of Co-authors per Paper Over the space of nearly 20 years, the average number of co-authors per article has increased across all fields of study, albeit not uniformly (the effect seems bigger in the physical sciences). But why is this happening

Why do we pay for research from the public purse, exactly? As I wrote a few weeks ago, it wasn’t always the case. It was only after American scientists working in universities demonstrated how their knowledge and skills could contribute to national security that the idea really took off. Fifteen years later, two American economists came to provide a dollars-and cents rationale for public funding of research. In 1959, Richard Nelson argued that the private sector was likely to underinvest in