48,172 research outputs found
Modeling and Analysis of Scholar Mobility on Scientific Landscape
Scientific literature till date can be thought of as a partially revealed
landscape, where scholars continue to unveil hidden knowledge by exploring
novel research topics. How do scholars explore the scientific landscape , i.e.,
choose research topics to work on? We propose an agent-based model of topic
mobility behavior where scholars migrate across research topics on the space of
science following different strategies, seeking different utilities. We use
this model to study whether strategies widely used in current scientific
community can provide a balance between individual scientific success and the
efficiency and diversity of the whole academic society. Through extensive
simulations, we provide insights into the roles of different strategies, such
as choosing topics according to research potential or the popularity. Our model
provides a conceptual framework and a computational approach to analyze
scholars' behavior and its impact on scientific production. We also discuss how
such an agent-based modeling approach can be integrated with big real-world
scholarly data.Comment: To appear in BigScholar, WWW 201
Omnivorousness in sport: The importance of social capital and networks
There has been for some time a significant and growing body of research around the relationship between sport and social capital. Similarly, within sociology there has been a corpus of work that has acknowledged the emergence of the omnivore–univore relationship. Surprisingly, relatively few studies examining sport and social capital have taken the omnivore–univore framework as a basis for understanding the relationship between sport and social capital. This gap in the sociology of sport literature and knowledge is rectified by this study that takes not Putnam, Coleman or Bourdieu, but Lin’s social network approach to social capital. The implications of this article are that researchers investigating sport and social capital need to understand more about how social networks and places for sport work to create social capital and, in particular, influence participating in sporting activities. The results indicate that social networks both facilitate and constrain sports participation; whilst family and friendship networks are central in active lifestyles, those who are less active have limited networks
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Citation and peer review of data: moving towards formal data publication
This paper discusses many of the issues associated with formally publishing data in academia, focusing primarily on the structures that need to be put in place for peer review and formal citation of datasets. Data publication is becoming increasingly important to the scientific community, as it will provide a mechanism for those who create data to receive academic credit for their work and will allow the conclusions arising from an analysis to be more readily verifiable, thus promoting transparency in the scientific process. Peer review of data will also provide a mechanism for ensuring the quality of datasets, and we provide suggestions on the types of activities one expects to see in the peer review of data. A simple taxonomy of data publication methodologies is presented and evaluated, and the paper concludes with a discussion of dataset granularity, transience and semantics, along with a recommended human-readable citation syntax
The Scientific Competitiveness of Nations
We use citation data of scientific articles produced by individual nations in
different scientific domains to determine the structure and efficiency of
national research systems. We characterize the scientific fitness of each
nation (that is, the competitiveness of its research system) and the complexity
of each scientific domain by means of a non-linear iterative algorithm able to
assess quantitatively the advantage of scientific diversification. We find that
technological leading nations, beyond having the largest production of
scientific papers and the largest number of citations, do not specialize in a
few scientific domains. Rather, they diversify as much as possible their
research system. On the other side, less developed nations are competitive only
in scientific domains where also many other nations are present.
Diversification thus represents the key element that correlates with scientific
and technological competitiveness. A remarkable implication of this structure
of the scientific competition is that the scientific domains playing the role
of "markers" of national scientific competitiveness are those not necessarily
of high technological requirements, but rather addressing the most
"sophisticated" needs of the society
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Ostrich or eagle? Protection and professionalism in sport science and coaching
In this presentation I examine the processes of professionalisation and mutual development within and between two occupational groups in the UK - sport and exercise scientists and sports coaches. At the outset I acknowledge the ‘cultural turn’ in science and use my own positionality, based on 30 years of experience within both communities, to inform the analysis. The main questions addressed here are whether these two interdependent groups have found a satisfactory professional relationship and how they have adjusted to the destabilising forces of late modernity. The issue of child protection in sport is used as a case study through which to examine these questions. The readiness of the two groups to acknowledge and embrace associated ethical and professional practices differs considerably. It is argued that sports coaching has addressed protection issues much more readily and effectively than has sport science. It is also suggested that the preoccupation of sport science with scholarly activity undermines the realisation of its aspiration for professional and chartered status. The emphasis of both occupational groups on ‘performance enhancement’, both scholarly and/or athletic, has led them to suffer from diminished social and political perspectives which benefit neither. The paper concludes with some reflections on the potential for both occupations to learn from attending to wider external reference points
Prestige drives epistemic inequality in the diffusion of scientific ideas
The spread of ideas in the scientific community is often viewed as a
competition, in which good ideas spread further because of greater intrinsic
fitness, and publication venue and citation counts correlate with importance
and impact. However, relatively little is known about how structural factors
influence the spread of ideas, and specifically how where an idea originates
might influence how it spreads. Here, we investigate the role of faculty hiring
networks, which embody the set of researcher transitions from doctoral to
faculty institutions, in shaping the spread of ideas in computer science, and
the importance of where in the network an idea originates. We consider
comprehensive data on the hiring events of 5032 faculty at all 205
Ph.D.-granting departments of computer science in the U.S. and Canada, and on
the timing and titles of 200,476 associated publications. Analyzing five
popular research topics, we show empirically that faculty hiring can and does
facilitate the spread of ideas in science. Having established such a mechanism,
we then analyze its potential consequences using epidemic models to simulate
the generic spread of research ideas and quantify the impact of where an idea
originates on its longterm diffusion across the network. We find that research
from prestigious institutions spreads more quickly and completely than work of
similar quality originating from less prestigious institutions. Our analyses
establish the theoretical trade-offs between university prestige and the
quality of ideas necessary for efficient circulation. Our results establish
faculty hiring as an underlying mechanism that drives the persistent epistemic
advantage observed for elite institutions, and provide a theoretical lower
bound for the impact of structural inequality in shaping the spread of ideas in
science.Comment: 10 pages, 8 figures, 1 tabl
Predicting the long-term citation impact of recent publications
A fundamental problem in citation analysis is the prediction of the long-term
citation impact of recent publications. We propose a model to predict a
probability distribution for the future number of citations of a publication.
Two predictors are used: The impact factor of the journal in which a
publication has appeared and the number of citations a publication has received
one year after its appearance. The proposed model is based on quantile
regression. We employ the model to predict the future number of citations of a
large set of publications in the field of physics. Our analysis shows that both
predictors (i.e., impact factor and early citations) contribute to the accurate
prediction of long-term citation impact. We also analytically study the
behavior of the quantile regression coefficients for high quantiles of the
distribution of citations. This is done by linking the quantile regression
approach to a quantile estimation technique from extreme value theory. Our work
provides insight into the influence of the impact factor and early citations on
the long-term citation impact of a publication, and it takes a step toward a
methodology that can be used to assess research institutions based on their
most recently published work.Comment: 17 pages, 17 figure
Genetic similarity promotes evolution of cooperation under lethal intergroup competition
Altruism (helping others at a cost to oneself) may evolve via group selection if the cost of altruism to the individual is compensated for by growth differences among groups when (1) there is high genetic variation among members of different groups; (2) more altruistic groups grow faster and (3) between-group migration is low. Nevertheless, group selection may not fully explain the actual evolution of helping behaviour if between-group migration was sufficiently common to have reduced between-group genetic variance. Lethal intergroup competition, which amplifies such growth differences between groups, appears to have been frequent in humans'; ancestral environments and could bear importantly on the evolution of altruism. Here we show that between-group migration and resulting genetic similarity can promote the evolution of costly helping behavior in the context of lethal intergroup conflict, albeit by selection at the individual level and not by group selection. The standard group selection models do not capture such basic elements of lethal intergroup competition as the possibility of an individual's altruism being critical to the group's success when that possibility is inversely proportional to genetic variation among members of the competing groups
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