Part IV: Collaboration metrics based on diversity of actor attributes

In our scientific networks, the neighborhood of a researcher is the set of all his collaborators in a year. Thus, the degree of department, college or discipline diversity in a researcher's neighborhood measures the extent to which that researcher engages in interdisciplinary research. CTSI researchers show a higher neighborhood diversity on average over 2008-2012, which means that the CTSI has functioned as a hub for interdisciplinary research at UF in the last years. This is confirmed by the higher number of authors per publication and investigators per grant in the CTSI, compared to the rest of the university. Finally, the CTSI exhibits a prevalence of "open triads" of researchers, as opposed to closed triads, over the years. As open triads tend to connect separate and distant areas of the network, this structural feature of the CTSI network suggests as well an increasing diversity of backgrounds, methods, and substantive topics in CTSI research activities.