Academics base conclusions on a decade of MIT publications and patents
It has long been thought that physical proximity drives collaboration between researchers on university campuses. Now a new study conducted at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has confirmed that this still holds true, even in the age of easy online communication.
The study, which analysed 40,358 published papers and 2,350 patents that stemmed from MIT research and appeared between 2004 and 2014, found that academics located in the same workspace were three times more likely to collaborate than those who were 400m apart. The frequency of collaboration dropped by half again among researchers whose offices were 800m apart.
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