Discovering synergistic qualities of published authors to enhance translational research

Translational research is the process of bringing together basic scientific research and improvements in patient care. This process, by its very nature, requires a wide range of skills and resources, typically not found within any single individual. This project investigates the synergistic features of published researchers at the Oregon Clinical and Translational Research Institute(OCTRI) to see how scientists with different specializations can be brought together to improve translational research.The investigated features were author connectivity and complementarity of research subjects. Author connectivity was measured by taking the Average Path Length (APL) and cluster coefficients [1] over an OCTRIcoauthor network. A high degree of connectivity, or low APL value, would indicate that a researcher has participated in many collaborations and published many papers with other OCTRI researchers. This would imply that they have some experience we could leverage to build teams for translational research. Subject complementarity was established by using pairs of frequently co-occurring MeSH terms. Those terms were then used to bridge researchers together through indirect Swanson matching [2] and present evidence of topic synergy, or potential collaborative synergy.Our initial investigation supports the development of a collaborative browsing tool to assist the creation of new translational research teams. Such a tool is being developed at the OCTRI and will include a user-centric evaluation in the near future.