Inheritance patterns in citation networks reveal scientific memes

Memes are the cultural equivalent of genes that spread across human culture by means of imitation. What makes a meme and what distinguishes it from other forms of information, however, is still poorly understood. Our analysis of memes in the scientific literature reveals that they are governed by a surprisingly simple relationship between frequency of occurrence and the degree to which they propagate along the citation graph. We propose a simple formalization of this pattern and we validate it with data from close to 50 million publication records from the Web of Science, PubMed Central, and the American Physical Society. Evaluations relying on human annotators, citation network randomizations, and comparisons with several alternative approaches confirm that our formula is accurate and effective, without a dependence on linguistic or ontological knowledge and without the application of arbitrary thresholds or filters.Comment: 8 two-column pages, 5 figures; accepted for publication in Physical Review

Are scientific memes inherited differently from gendered authorship?

This paper seeks to build upon the previous literature on gender aspects in research collaboration and knowledge diffusion. Our approach adds the meme inheritance notion to traditional citation analysis, as we investigate if scientific memes are inherited differently from gendered authorship. Since authors of scientific papers inherit knowledge from their cited authors, once authorship is gendered we are able to characterize the inheritance process with respect to the frequencies of memes and their propagation scores depending on the gender of the authors. By applying methods that enable the gender disambiguation of authors, missing data on the gender of citing and cited authors is dealt with. Our empirically based approach allows for investigating the combined effect of meme inheritance and gendered transmission. Results show that scientific memes do not spread differently from either male or female cited authors. Likewise, the memes that we analyse were not found to propagate more easily via male or female inheritance.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

The Genealogy of Ideology: Predicting Agreement and Persuasive Memes in the U.S. Courts of Appeals

We employ machine learning techniques to identify common characteristics and features from cases in the US courts of appeals that contribute in determining dissent. Our models were able to predict vote alignment with an average F1 score of 73%, and our results show that the length of the opinion, the number of citations in the opinion, and voting valence, are all key factors in determining dissent. These results indicate that certain high level characteristics of a case can be used to predict dissent. We also explore the influence of dissent using seating patterns of judges, and our results show that raw counts of how often two judges sit together plays a role in dissent. In addition to the dissents, we analyze the notion of memetic phrases occurring in opinions - phrases that see a small spark of popularity but eventually die out in usage - and try to correlate them to dissent

‘Viral’ hunts? A cultural Darwinian analysis of witch persecutions

The theory of Darwinian cultural evolution is gaining currency in many parts of the socio-cultural sciences, but it remains contentious. Critics claim that the theory is either fundamentally mistaken or boils down to a fancy re-description of things we knew all along. We will argue that cultural Darwinism can indeed resolve long-standing socio-cultural puzzles; this is demonstrated through a cultural Darwinian analysis of the European witch persecutions. Two central and unresolved questions concerning witch-hunts will be addressed. From the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries, a remarkable and highly specific concept of witchcraft was taking shape in Europe. The first question is: who constructed it? With hindsight, we can see that the concept contains many elements that appear to be intelligently designed to ensure the continuation of witch persecutions, such as the witches’ sabbat, the diabolical pact, nightly flight, and torture as a means of interrogation. The second question is: why did beliefs in witchcraft and witch-hunts persist and disseminate, despite the fact that, as many historians have concluded, no one appears to have substantially benefited from them? Historians have convincingly argued that witch-hunts were not inspired by some hidden agenda; persecutors genuinely believed in the threat of witchcraft to their communities. We propose that the apparent ‘design’ exhibited by concepts of witchcraft resulted from a Darwinian process of evolution, in which cultural variants that accidentally enhanced the reproduction of the witch-hunts were selected and accumulated. We argue that witch persecutions form a prime example of a ‘viral’ socio-cultural phenomenon that reproduces ‘selfishly’, even harming the interests of its human hosts