A computational model of team assembly in emerging scientific fields

This paper examines the assembly of interdisciplinary teams in emerging scientific fields. We develop and validate a hybrid systems dynamics and agent-based computational model using data over a 15 year period from the assembly of teams in the emerging scientific field of Oncofertility. We found that, when a new field emerges, team assembly is influenced by the reputation and seniority of the researchers, prior collaborators, prior collaborators´ collaborators, and the prior popularity of an individual as a collaborator by all others. We also found that individuals are more likely to assemble into an Oncofertility team when there is a modicum of overlap across its global ecosystem of teams; the ecosystem is defined as the collection of teams that share members with other teams that share members with the Oncofertility team.