Mapping the origins of knowledge breakthroughs

Principal Investigator: Ahmed Doha, Supply Chain Management
Project Title: The Pursuit of Breakthroughs: Trajectories, Antecedents, and Consequences in Traversing the Map of Knowledge in Business and Management (B&M) Research
Funder: CORIS Development Grant

This research project will apply computational linguistic methods to the word-level content of millions of research publications to shed new light on how knowledge trajectories lead to breakthroughs (i.e., knowledge discoveries that result in disproportionate impact on research and practice). It will generate a model of Business and Management (B&M) knowledge as a three-dimensional (3D) embedding vector space, organizing the ontological features in B&M literature along dimensions that correspond to published knowledge in the fields of economics, sociology, and psychology, respectively. By computing a trajectory vector space for each breakthrough in the study sample and overlaying the trajectories on the 3D map, the research will reveal feature-, researcher-, and institution-level characteristics of trajectories that are likely to lead to breakthrough discoveries. Findings will help researchers, universities, publishers, funding agencies, and policymakers make decisions that maximize their return on research investment.