Thread by @mattsclancy

With academic conferences all being cancelled, a few weeks ago a lot of people wondered why we need in-person conferences at all. Can't we just present over zoom?

One objection is that networking at these conferences matters. Does it? Here's a 🧵. #ThursdayThreads

One place to start is to ask people where they met their academic coauthors. That's what Freeman, @inaganguli, and @ravivmg (2015) do (among other things). Among coauthors not living in the same city, about 15% met at conferences. nber.org/chapters/c13040

Alternatively, you can try to measure the causal impact of attending a conference. Chai and Freeman (2019) look at the Gordon Research conferences of the early 1990s, a set of bio conferences where groups of 80-150 met for a week in a remote location. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.10…

Comparing attendees to non-attendees (working in similar areas, with similar experience, publications, # of collaborations, and citations received), they find attendees with no prior collaboration produce 9% more joint publications than controls.

Or you can do this with a quasi-experiment. Campos. Leon, and McQuillen (2018) look at the abrupt cancellation of the 2012 American Political Science Association annual meeting, as a result of Hurricane Isaac. academic.oup.com/ej/article/128…

This is cool because they have a list of all the people who were expected to attend. They comparing the propensity to form new collaborations among these expected attendees to actual attendees in previous years, and other political science conferences in the same year.

They estimate the cancellation reduced the probability two expected attendees collaborate by 16%. Effect is strongest for attendees who do not live in the same city.

Lastly, you could actually run an experiment. Boudreau et al. (2017) randomly assign participants in a Harvard Medical School research symposium to different physically separated rooms, where they learn about each other's research and brainstorm about grant opportunity.

The whole thing lasted only about 90 minutes, but people in the same room were 75% more likely to jointly apply for a mini-grant. (Note: from a very low base rate. Also, everyone was already affiliated with HMS, so more likely to reside in same city). mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdfplus/10…

So do conferences facilitate networking? Yeah!
If you move your conference to zoom, try to incorporate some time for digital socializing.
Better yet, create the opportunity for digital socializing, but randomize who you tell about it. Then tell us if it works! \fin

PS - if you liked this, I normally write about new research on innovation on Thursdays.
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