“Research is the discovery, the invention of things that others have not done. So it is by definition a form of competition. You have to take it”said Antoine Petit, in The world, on February 14, when he had just been reappointed as head of the CNRS. Except that not everyone agrees, evoking a long list of negative effects of competition, such as the development of individualism, the brakes on collaborations, the culture of secrecy, wasted time and money. to compete…
“There are always many opinions on the matter, but few informed opinions”, recalls Pierre Azoulay, professor of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Hence the interest of a work being reviewed by peers, updated at the beginning of the year. Carolyn Stein and Ryan Hill, respectively in post-doctorate at Stanford and at Brigham Young University, after their thesis at MIT, demonstrate for the first time a negative effect of this competition: it produces results of lower quality… “We often heard people talking about this association between competition and negative effects, but it was based on anecdotes, so we wanted to see what data could say”summarizes Carolyn Stein.
Their method is clever. As a field of competition, the duo studied structural biologists who seek to know, thanks to X-rays, the form of a protein, linked to its function. These data are deposited in a public database, Protein Data Bank (PDB), for everyone to benefit from.
The risk of competition
The two researchers describe a behavioral model of this community of biologists. The latter decide to embark on the determination of a protein structure, by estimating the time that it will take them, the returns that they can expect (in terms of citations of their article in subsequent works) and the resources human resources to devote to it. But they must take into account the risk of being overtaken by competitors. “It’s a simplification of the real world, but experts in the field told us it’s fair enough”, says Carolyn Stein. This dilemma, between the time to devote to their work and the fear of being second, is described by a fairly simple mathematical model, which has the good taste to provide predictions, and above all whose variables can be calculated.
Thus, the quality of research is measured by the precision of the three-dimensional structures obtained. The time spent and the number of people involved are available in the database. The number of competing teams is also accessible, by studying how many protein structures have been deposited there. Finally, the “potential” of a search is evaluated by the duo, using a tool for predicting the number of times the article is cited, an indicator certainly disputed, but widely used to estimate the recognition of a work. This prediction is based on the analysis of the type of structures that have been more or less cited in the past.
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