Exploration in Research Teams: Building on the Shoulders of PhD Students

Raffaele Miniaci, Michele Pezzoni and Sotaro Shibayama
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Raffaele Miniaci: University of Brescia, Italy
Michele Pezzoni: Université Côte d'Azur, CNRS, GREDEG, France
Sotaro Shibayama: The University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan

No 2025-49, GREDEG Working Papers from Groupe de REcherche en Droit, Economie, Gestion (GREDEG CNRS), Université Côte d'Azur, France

Abstract: Exploration is a critical input for creativity and innovation. This paper aims to investigate how the innovator and her team's exploration activities boost the innovator's performance. In our empirical context, the innovator is a French professor at the university, and her team consists of her PhD students. We study 14,978 research teams, led by an equivalent number of supervisors. Supervisors and students can explore by investigating research subjects that the supervisor has not previously investigated. Moreover, the direction of their exploration can be more or less aligned. We measure exploration by assessing the similarity of students' and supervisors' research documents using text analysis. Our regression analyses find that both supervisors' and students' exploration activities play a role in determining the supervisors' performance, as measured by publication quantity, impact, and novelty. We show that an optimal combination of exploration activities and alignment yields considerably higher supervisor performance compared to the average. Our results support the idea that PhD students' exploration activities are of paramount importance to their supervisors' performance, and that supervisors should pay close attention when assigning students' thesis subjects.

Keywords: Research teams; Student exploration; Supervisor exploration; Scientific performance; Text analysis algorithm; Science of science (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I20 O30 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 34 pages
Date: 2025-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eur, nep-inv, nep-sbm and nep-sog
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