How can central research facilities expand their role in the science community?

Governments and research consortia can reap great benefits for the community and industry through large, shared research facilities and infrastructure.

What happens when experiments are too big and too expensive for a single university to run?

Some research efforts need to be conducted at a huge scale, drawing on multiple partner institutions; it’s not always feasible or advisable for one institution to be the sole focus of that work. Instead, large scientific instruments and experimental infrastructure are built and maintained at central facilities.

These advanced research tools range from underground labs at the bottom of mines, to free-electron lasers and particle accelerators – such as the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, Switzerland.

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the world’s largest particle accelerator. It’s a prime example of a facility that fosters international scientific collaboration. Photograph: Dominguez, Daniel; Brice, Maximilien. Credit: CERN.

Due to their scale and cost, these facilities tend to be built and managed by government agencies or public research funders and made available to the national or international research communities. Such research facilities represent a major, long-term investment in a region’s research and innovation capability – from initial conception, to designing, building, maintaining, and upgrading facilities and their equipment, the commitment required from governments and their agencies can span decades of public expenditure.

For example, by the time Diamond – the UK’s national synchrotron light source – started accelerating electrons, it was one of the British Government’s largest capital expenditures on research and development in 40 years, costing £260 million (more than US $300 million in today’s currency). From the time of the initial report in the 1990s recommending its construction to the date of its first user beam in 2007, the synchrotron had taken 14 years to come to fruition.

Diamond Light Source is the United Kingdom’s national synchrotron. It was the largest science facility to be built in the UK for 40 years.

Why do governments and funders invest so much in central research facilities?

The discoveries made at central facilities would be impossible elsewhere. Experiments at such facilities employ highly specialised technical equipment and foster collaboration between leading experts, attracting national and international scientific talent. This combination of technical excellence with scientific expertise leads to novel results, the creation of new knowledge and innovation, and pushes the frontiers of many research fields. From an academic standpoint, it ensures high-impact publications and insights that can have a ripple effect through science and education for decades to come. For governments, industry and the community, such discoveries can lead to great economic and social outcomes.

How do researchers get to run experiments at central facilities?

Many facilities operate a user program; the “users” are often researchers based at universities or government agencies, visiting the facility for a few days or weeks to perform experiments that further their research. While at the facility they work with a second group of researchers and technical crew, employed by the facility to run the scientific instruments. The users and inhouse researchers collaborate to run experiments and publish the results from experiments as co-authors.

How can Dimensions be used to evaluate user facilities?  

Dimensions is the world’s largest database of research information, including individual researchers and their institutions, their research grants, publications, datasets, patents – even clinical trials as a linked dataset. Using Dimensions, it’s possible to delve into the connections between researchers, including those working at central research facilities.

Here we explore the collaboration patterns of users and in-house researchers at ISIS Neutron and Muon Source in the UK. At ISIS, beams of neutrons or muons are used to study materials at the atomic scale – from cracks in wind turbine blades to the structures of viruses and the inner workings of lithium batteries.  

We’ve made this example a bit harder for ourselves because ISIS is not currently indexed in Dimensions as a research organisation; instead, inhouse scientists are shown to be affiliated to the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL) where ISIS is based. Therefore, to find articles that include experimental results from ISIS, we can devise a search string within Dimensions that returns articles mentioning ISIS in the full text. This search string will, for example, look into each article’s methods sections, in which co-authors will indicate that data was collected at ISIS. Sounds complex? Not really, because the information available to Dimensions is so deep that we’re able to conduct this search with relative ease.

Who gets to use these facilities, and how can Dimensions help?

Comparative analyses are always useful. Here (Figure 1) we’ve conducted an analysis that compares the use of ISIS Neutron and Muon Source by researchers at the 24 leading Russell Group universities (effectively the UK’s “Ivy League”) with all other non-Russell Group universities. We can see which institution’s researchers get to use ISIS by comparing the number of articles that mention that facility.

Figure 1: Number of articles that mention ISIS, authored by researchers from Russell Group universities versus non-Russell Group universities.Source: Dimensions.

We see that Russell Group researchers are nearly three times more likely to be co-authors on publications mentioning ISIS than a non-Russell Group researcher.

Such an analysis could be used to identify opportunities to widen the user base of central facilities, ensuring that all eligible researchers – regardless of their home institution, country or research focus – have the opportunity to run experiments at those facilities.

Figure 2: Collaboration networks of publications that mention ISIS. Organisation (nodes) linked by co-authored articles that mention ISIS (lines with thickness proportional to number of articles). Source: Dimensions, using VOSviewer.

In this network diagram (Figure 2) we see which research organisations are collaborating with ISIS. Co-authorship is used as a proxy for collaboration; if researchers from two different organisations have co-authored an article, then that is considered a collaboration between their two organisations.

As we might expect, articles that mention ISIS are most often co-authored by teams of researchers from RAL and UK universities, usually Russell Group. However, this network diagram reveals a second set of collaborations between inhouse researchers at ISIS affiliated to RAL and researchers at other neutron facilities across Europe and the US.

Similar analyses could be prepared showing collaborations between individual users, disciplines or countries. Dimensions’ full-text search means that analysis could also focus on a whole national laboratory site, such as RAL or Argonne National Laboratory, a single machine, or facility.

What else can Dimensions show?

There are a host of questions that Dimensions can support governments and funders in answering, including:

• Which research areas or emerging technologies are facility experiments contributing to?
  Value: to anticipate the current and future needs of the research community and inform beamline commissioning and future strategy.
• Comparing facilities – do existing or future infrastructure plans copy, compete or complement similar facilities? Are there existing collaborations or opportunities to foster new collaborations?
  Value: to avoid duplication and needless expense and maximise strategic expenditure.
• Do participants of facilities’ training programs become facility users?
  Value: to see where training and professional development programs are demonstrating the most effectiveness, leading to return on investment.
• Find experiment proposal reviewers with relevant expertise.
  Value: identifying cross-collaboration opportunities and widening the pool of facility users.
• Are funding agency award holders using facilities?
  Value: identifying appropriate use of public expenditure and return on investment.

About Dimensions

Part of Digital Science, Dimensions is a modern, innovative, linked research data infrastructure and tool, re-imagining discovery and access to research: grants, publications, citations, clinical trials, patents and policy documents in one place. www.dimensions.ai 

Talk with our team about how Dimensions can support your research.

Alex Sinclair

About the Author

Alex Sinclair is a Senior Analyst in the Dimensions Government and Funder team.

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Inspiring dreams: the new James Webb Space Telescope

“Cosmic Cliffs” in the Carina Nebula, approximately 7,600 light-years away from Earth. Image taken by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).
Image credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScI.

As children we look up to the beauty of the night sky and are inspired to dream. I recall as a small child being fascinated by my father’s books on astronomy and the beautiful pictures of now-familiar starscapes such as the Horsehead Nebula. That led me to join the astronomy club at school and spending nights in the cold, sleeping on the floor of the cricket pavilion, and waking up at the right time with other similarly nerdy teens, to peer up through a telescope lens to see if we could locate the moons of Jupiter. How many of today’s scientists (not just astronomers) are doing what they do in part due to some similar formative experience? A wonder about the universe and a desire to understand its mysteries.

A whole new generation of scientists may now have been inspired to dream and perhaps, one day, will pursue a career in research. The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), launched at the end of last year, released its first images a week ago. While one does not need to be a scientist to find these shots breathtaking, it is humbling to think that we live in an age where “big science” events like this don’t just happen once in a lifetime, but every few years. Indeed, the pace of discovery is accelerating, powered by the engineering and technology that globally both the public and private research ecosystem is building.

It is said that familiarity breeds contempt, and perhaps a justifiable fear that the regularity of such advances may lead to a lack of anticipation or excitement, as happened with the US space program in the 1970s. But, as we will see below, at least in the global science community, JWST is already set to loom large in our collective psyches for some years to come and bring huge value to our lives in so many ways, as Professor Monica Grady from the Open University has so eloquently set out.

The idea of going beyond our atmosphere to look at the stars was first suggested by American theoretical physicist Lyman Spitzer in 1946. His ideas led to a number of orbital observatories – the American Orbiting Astronomical Observatory OAO-2 in 1968, the Soviet Orion 1 in 1971. This lineage eventually led to the most famous space telescope to date, Hubble. And it is Hubble that we want to use as a benchmark to compare the attention associated with JWST.

Riding off the back of the success of the moon landing, NASA put forward a paper in 1969 on the uses of a large space telescope, but it was not until 1977 that the ambitious project was funded. Six years later in 1983 the name Hubble was given to the project. While the terrible Challenger disaster of 1986 must have caused significant internal challenges at NASA, the project pressed on and Hubble was launched in 1990, with the first scientific paper being submitted on 1st October 1990.

In the subsequent 32 years, even with initial teething trouble, Hubble has not only gone on to profoundly advance our understanding of the universe in which we live – from helping to establish the existence of black holes, to detecting water vapour on Europa (one of those moons of Jupiter that I was searching for all those years ago) – but has also served as a platform for us to understand how to engineer devices that live in the vacuum of space.

When Hubble first returned results in 1990, I recall the media attention being massive. My perception is that this is similar today but when I looked at Dimensions, I was shocked to see that there were already almost 15,000 papers citing the JWST! I couldn’t help but wonder if JWST is already more famous than Hubble.

Figure 1: Scholarly mentions of Hubble versus JWST from Dimensions placed on a reference timeline zeroed to their first pictures. “T-0” is 1990 for Hubble and 2022 for JWST. Note that the name for JWST was announced around 20 years before the first pictures were released whereas Hubble was named just seven years prior to its first pictures being shared. Source: Dimensions.

It seems, at first glance, that the JWST is receiving significantly more attention than Hubble at the same point in its existence. One might speculate as to the reasons for this – perhaps being named relatively further in advance of launch than Hubble, or the controversy over the choice of name might have increased the attention to the telescope. However, the growth of research over the intervening years is not negligible (indeed, Hubble has played an important role in the growth in astronomical and space science).

The area of Astronomy and Space Science (ANZSRC FoR 0201) has grown significantly in the last 30 years and much of that growth comes from the advances made possible by Hubble itself. Using the ANZSRC FoR (Field of Research) definition of the field, Dimensions suggests that there were around 6,600 papers, conference proceedings, pre-prints, monographs and edited books produced in the 1983, whereas in 2021, there were around 33,600 such outputs – a five-fold increase. (Book chapters are specifically removed from all the analyses here to remove peaks from astronomical encyclopaedia publications that skew specific years.)

Figure 2: Scholarly attention to HST and JWST in the academic literature – as in Figure 1, but with JWST mentions normalised based on factoring the growth in the field of Astronomy. Source: Dimensions.

Figure 2 shows the result of a simple approach to rebase the JWST attention, to account for the difference in time periods during which the attention was received. In this case, we looked at the growth in Astrophysics using the ANZSRC FoR Code definition of 0201 Astronomical and Space Science to create an inflation rate for the field from 1983 (T-20) to present day. We then divided the JWST output number by the compound inflation rate year on year for each year from T-7 up to T-0.

Normalisation, however, must be taken with real care. There is one further edge effect that means that we cannot trust the T-0 JWST line. Since 2022 (T-0 for the red line) is the current year, it is incomplete and hence cannot be compared to a full year. You can see the same effect in the dip in T+32 (2022 for the blue Hubble line). Thus, while 2022 looks to be a disappointing year for JWST, it is because the comparison is between a partial year with a full year. This will, I’m sure, be an amazing year for JWST publications, which are set for lift off in the coming years, if the example set by Hubble is followed.

Subjectively, it is often easy to recall the golden days of the past and how wonderful things were. However, in this case, we can see that the level of excitement, as measured through research publications, of the JWST compared with the launch of the Hubble is entirely comparable. Not only this, thanks to Hubble this excitement has been sustained over the last 20 years.

We at Digital Science wish the JWST team at NASA and around the world the very best for their coming data releases. This is the stuff of which dreams, and future scientists, are made.

About Dimensions

Part of Digital Science, Dimensions is a modern, innovative, linked research data infrastructure and tool, re-imagining discovery and access to research: grants, publications, citations, clinical trials, patents and policy documents in one place. www.dimensions.ai 

Daniel Hook

About the Author

Daniel Hook, CEO | Digital Science

Daniel Hook is CEO of Digital Science, co-founder of Symplectic, a research information management provider, and of the Research on Research Institute (RoRI). A theoretical physicist by training, he continues to do research in his spare time, with visiting positions at Imperial College London and Washington University in St Louis.

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