Skip to main content
UMass Collegiate M The University of Massachusetts Amherst
  • Visit
  • Apply
  • Give
  • Search UMass.edu
College of Social & Behavioral Sciences College of Social & Behavioral Sciences

Main navigation

  • Academics

    Explore our programs

    All programsUndergraduateGraduateCertificates
    See all departments
    Faculty & StaffSignature programsExploratory track
  • Research
    Research centers, institutes, and programsResearch news and highlightsGrant Funding and PoliciesExternal Fellowship OpportunitiesFaculty Research Grants & Awards
    Institute for Social Science ResearchFaculty BookshelfFreedman Lecture SeriesResearch Events
  • Student Services
    Student ServicesGraduate Student ResourcesAdvisingSBS RISE
    Senior CelebrationStudent EventsStudent NewsInternship & Career Opportunities
  • About
    SBS Dean's OfficeVisit UsStrategic planDiversity, Equity and InclusionFaculty & Staff DirectoryNewsEventsAlumni
    Professional ResourcesFaculty ResourcesStaff ResourcesContact Us

Breadcrumb

  1. Home
  2. News

Economist Lucy Xiaolu Wang Publishes New Paper in PLOS ONE

December 13, 2022 Academics

Content

Lucy Xiaolu Wang, resource economics, recently published a research paper in the journal PLOS ONE in which she and her co-author explored the effectiveness of the Human Brain Project (HBP) Forum, an online collaborative platform that allows neuroscience researchers to ask – and respond to – questions about the latest breakthroughs and obstacles in the field.

“The HBP Forum was launched in July 2015 as an integral connecting part of the HBP platform infrastructure,” write Wang and co-author Ann-Christin Kreyer, doctoral student at the Munich Graduate School of Economics and Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition. “The forum serves as a public discussion website about HBP-related topics, including questions on HBP-related activities in general, neuroscience progress, and programming challenges.”

The authors compare the HBP Forum to the Stack Overflow computer programming forum, in which topics raised and discussed are public and can be read without registering an account, but only users with a forum account can reply to or comment on topics. “The HBP Forum is designed to facilitate informal collaboration and knowledge-sharing between researchers within and beyond the HBP community,” they explain.

Wang and Kreyer constructed a novel and comprehensive dataset to capture the usage of the HBP Forum, including the range of topics being discussed, plus whether, how quickly and by whom research problems are solved. They found that the HBP Forum is actively used and remains active during COVID-19, that on average each forum post is discussed at a similar interaction level as those on other platforms like Stack Overflow and that the forum’s usage recovered fairly quickly after an initial drop of activity during COVID’s first wave.

They also found that most questions posted on the HBP Forum are solved within 16 days, and that questions are solved faster when forum administrators participate and when code snippets are included. They observed that the forum “appears to be an inclusive online community, where the usage and discussions do not significantly differ across HBP affiliation,” and found no evidence that the gender or seniority level of users alter the discussion intensity or problem-solving probability.

“Our results provide encouraging evidence that the online community built through the HBP has generated active participation among users from different institutions and with different educational levels who may not have otherwise connected,” they conclude. “The institutional support provided by forum administrators appears helpful in supporting the collaborative progress of the online neuroscience community, which may be especially important at the current time, when physical distance to peers is increased. Our analyses offer a first glimpse into the facets of a particular online collaboration infrastructure within a large, long-term life science project.”

The complete paper, “Collaborating neuroscience online: The case of the Human Brain Project forum,” is available online at PLOS ONE and is also available as a Max Planck Institute discussion paper.

This article first appeared on UMass News & Events.

Article posted in Academics for Faculty

Related programs

  • Resource Economics

Related departments

  • Resource Economics

Site footer

College of Social & Behavioral Sciences
  • X
  • Find us on Facebook
  • Find us on YouTube
  • Find us on Instagram
Address

Draper Hall
40 Campus Center Way
Amherst, MA 01003-9244
United States

Phone number
(413) 545-4173

Information for:

  • Undergraduate Students
  • Graduate Students
  • Faculty
  • Staff
  • Alumni

Academics

  • Explore our programs
  • Departments
  • Advising

The college

  • About SBS
  • News
  • Events
  • Employment Opportunities

Contact

  • Visit Us
  • Dean's Office Contacts
  • Faculty & Staff Directory

Global footer

  • ©2025 University of Massachusetts Amherst
  • Site policies
  • Privacy
  • Non-discrimination notice
  • Accessibility
  • Terms of use