Raffaele Vacca

Designing a CTSA-Based Social Network Intervention to Foster Cross-Disciplinary Team Science.

This paper explores the application of network intervention strategies to the problem of assembling cross‐disciplinary scientific teams in academic institutions. In a project supported by the University of Florida (UF) Clinical and Translational Science Institute, we used VIVO, a semantic‐web research networking system, to extract the social network of scientific collaborations on publications and awarded grants across all UF colleges and departments. Drawing on the notion of network interventions, we designed an alteration program to add specific edges to the collaboration network, that is, to create specific collaborations between previously unconnected investigators. The missing collaborative links were identified by a number of network criteria to enhance desirable structural properties of individual positions or the network as a whole. We subsequently implemented an online survey (N = 103) that introduced the potential collaborators to each other through their VIVO profiles, and investigated their attitudes toward starting a project together. We discuss the design of the intervention program, the network criteria adopted, and preliminary survey results. The results provide insight into the feasibility of intervention programs on scientific collaboration networks, as well as suggestions on the implementation of such programs to assemble cross‐disciplinary scientific teams in CTSA institutions.

Detecting and analyzing research communities in longitudinal scientific networks

A growing body of evidence shows that collaborative teams and communities tend to produce the highest-impact scientific work. This paper proposes a new method to (1) Identify collaborative communities in longitudinal scientific networks, and (2) Evaluate the impact of specific research institutes, services or policies on the interdisciplinary collaboration between these communities. First, we apply community-detection algorithms to cross-sectional scientific collaboration networks and analyze different types of co-membership in the resulting subgroups over time. This analysis summarizes large amounts of longitudinal network data to extract sets of research communities whose members have consistently collaborated or shared collaborators over time. Second, we construct networks of cross-community interactions and estimate Exponential Random Graph Models to predict the formation of interdisciplinary collaborations between different communities. The method is applied to longitudinal data on publication and grant collaborations at the University of Florida. Results show that similar institutional affiliation, spatial proximity, transitivity effects, and use of the same research services predict higher degree of interdisciplinary collaboration between research communities. Our application also illustrates how the identification of research communities in longitudinal data and the analysis of cross-community network formation can be used to measure the growth of interdisciplinary team science at a research university, and to evaluate its association with research policies, services or institutes.

Who and Where: A Socio-Spatial Integrated Approach for Community-Based Health Research

Social and spatial characteristics of a population often interact to influence health outcomes, suggesting a need to jointly analyze both to offer useful insights in community health. However, researchers have used either social or spatial analyses to examine community-based health issues and inform intervention programs. We propose a combined socio-spatial analytic approach to develop a social network with spatial weights and a spatial statistic with social weights, and apply them to an ongoing study of mental and physical well-being of rural Latino immigrants in North Florida, USA. We demonstrate how this approach can be used to calculate measures, such as social network centrality, support contact dyads, and spatial kernel density based on a health survey data. Findings reveal that the integrated approach accurately reflected interactions between social and spatial elements, and identified community members (who) and locations (where) that should be prioritized for community-based health interventions.

The emergence of team science: understanding the state of adoption research through social network analysis:

The notion of team science has recently gained popularity in European and American health sciences reviewing the increasing evidence that scientific collaboration produces higher-impact research and that complex scientific problems are better investigated by interdisciplinary teams. While publication surveys indicate that adoption research is expanding, it has not been formally evaluated for collaborative and cross-disciplinary activity. This article aims to elucidate the structure, composition and dynamics of scientific relationships within adoption studies that may inform research and practice strategies, competencies and cohesion within the field. Using social network analysis, we extracted data on 2767 peer-reviewed adoption-related articles from the 1930s to 2014 and evaluated the resulting co-authorship and co-citation networks. We found that adoption research has grown substantially over the last 25 years and is conducted in varied disciplines, with increasing collaboration across geography and disciplinary areas. As a result, the co-authorship and co-citation networks are approaching numeric thresholds and structural configurations distinctive of well-established and more institutionalised fields of study. These findings reveal the maturation of adoption studies as a team science and argue for the development of institutional mechanisms that support such evolution. Implications for professional and research planning are discussed.

FBO Leaders' Perceptions of the Psycho-social Contexts for Rural Latinos.

Latinos comprise the largest minority rural population in the US, and they are often exposed to adverse social health determinants that can detrimentally affect their mental health. Guided by community-based participatory research (CBPR) principles, this study aimed to describe faith-based organizations (FBOs) leaders’ perceptions of the contexts affecting the mental well-being of rural Latino immigrants and potential approaches to mental health promotion for these immigrants. This is a descriptive, qualitative arm of a larger study in which community-academic members have partnered to develop a culturally-tailored mental health promotion intervention among rural Latinos. FBO leaders (N = 15) from different denominations in North Florida were interviewed until saturation was reached. FBO leaders remarked that in addition to religiosity, which Latinos already have, more community building and involvement are necessary for the promotion of mental health.