  The COVID-19 pandemic necessitated social distancing at every level of
society, including universities and research institutes, raising essential
questions concerning the continuing importance of physical proximity for
scientific and scholarly advance. Using customized author surveys about the
intellectual influence of referenced work on scientists' own papers, combined
with precise measures of geographical and semantic distance between focal and
referenced works, we find that being at the same institution is strongly
associated with intellectual influence on scientists' and scholars' published
work. However, this influence increases with intellectual distance: the more
different the referenced work done by colleagues at one's institution, the more
influential it is on one's own. Universities worldwide constitute places where
people doing very different work engage in sustained interactions through
departments, committees, seminars, and communities. These interactions come to
uniquely influence their published research, suggesting the need to replace
rather than displace diverse engagements for sustainable advance.
