Assessing the impacts of convening experts: a bibliometric analysis of a research program spanning four decades

Over the last few decades, research institutions and funders have begun policies and programs that incentivize large-scale collaboration across institutions on focal research areas. Yet, few studies have evaluated the impact of those programs on research, particularly on timelines longer than a few years. Using the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR) as a case study, we examined the impacts of supporting a research program that convened experts across intuitions and countries for 40+ years. In this study, we used the Scopus bibliometric database to analyse publishing and citation trends within this team since its formation in 1986 and used nearest neighbour matching to compare these trends against authors across the globe with similar career characteristics to measure how effectively the CIFAR program Gravity & the Extreme Universe (CIFAR-GEU) has catalyzed collaborations and produced high quality research outputs. We found a greater degree of co-authorship within the CIFAR-GEU group compared to the Control group. We also found that the outputs generated by the CIFAR-GEU group had, overall, higher values for citation-based impact indicators (e.g., stronger metrics around citations, impact from international collaborations and reach beyond academia).