As the academic community becomes more complex and interconnected, the generation of innovative ideas will increasingly rely on researchers forming new connections to historically marginalized voices and historically distant fields. To gain a better understanding of the scientific process, my colleagues and I have investigated the relationships between scientists and scientific papers. Using novel network scientific approaches, this work has revealed the importance of interdisciplinary links and uncovered pervasive gender- and race-based inequity in citation practices. Ongoing projects seek to expand this line of research into new scientific disciplines and dimensions of bias, and to explore potential mechanisms for mitigating such inequities.