151,641 research outputs found
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
Tracing scientific influence
Scientometrics is the field of quantitative studies of scholarly activity. It
has been used for systematic studies of the fundamentals of scholarly practice
as well as for evaluation purposes. Although advocated from the very beginning
the use of scientometrics as an additional method for science history is still
under explored. In this paper we show how a scientometric analysis can be used
to shed light on the reception history of certain outstanding scholars. As a
case, we look into citation patterns of a specific paper by the American
sociologist Robert K. Merton.Comment: 25 pages LaTe
Communities, Knowledge Creation, and Information Diffusion
In this paper, we examine how patterns of scientific collaboration contribute
to knowledge creation. Recent studies have shown that scientists can benefit
from their position within collaborative networks by being able to receive more
information of better quality in a timely fashion, and by presiding over
communication between collaborators. Here we focus on the tendency of
scientists to cluster into tightly-knit communities, and discuss the
implications of this tendency for scientific performance. We begin by reviewing
a new method for finding communities, and we then assess its benefits in terms
of computation time and accuracy. While communities often serve as a taxonomic
scheme to map knowledge domains, they also affect how successfully scientists
engage in the creation of new knowledge. By drawing on the longstanding debate
on the relative benefits of social cohesion and brokerage, we discuss the
conditions that facilitate collaborations among scientists within or across
communities. We show that successful scientific production occurs within
communities when scientists have cohesive collaborations with others from the
same knowledge domain, and across communities when scientists intermediate
among otherwise disconnected collaborators from different knowledge domains. We
also discuss the implications of communities for information diffusion, and
show how traditional epidemiological approaches need to be refined to take
knowledge heterogeneity into account and preserve the system's ability to
promote creative processes of novel recombinations of idea
Network-based ranking in social systems: three challenges
Ranking algorithms are pervasive in our increasingly digitized societies,
with important real-world applications including recommender systems, search
engines, and influencer marketing practices. From a network science
perspective, network-based ranking algorithms solve fundamental problems
related to the identification of vital nodes for the stability and dynamics of
a complex system. Despite the ubiquitous and successful applications of these
algorithms, we argue that our understanding of their performance and their
applications to real-world problems face three fundamental challenges: (i)
Rankings might be biased by various factors; (2) their effectiveness might be
limited to specific problems; and (3) agents' decisions driven by rankings
might result in potentially vicious feedback mechanisms and unhealthy systemic
consequences. Methods rooted in network science and agent-based modeling can
help us to understand and overcome these challenges.Comment: Perspective article. 9 pages, 3 figure
Collective Influence of Multiple Spreaders Evaluated by Tracing Real Information Flow in Large-Scale Social Networks
Identifying the most influential spreaders that maximize information flow is
a central question in network theory. Recently, a scalable method called
"Collective Influence (CI)" has been put forward through collective influence
maximization. In contrast to heuristic methods evaluating nodes' significance
separately, CI method inspects the collective influence of multiple spreaders.
Despite that CI applies to the influence maximization problem in percolation
model, it is still important to examine its efficacy in realistic information
spreading. Here, we examine real-world information flow in various social and
scientific platforms including American Physical Society, Facebook, Twitter and
LiveJournal. Since empirical data cannot be directly mapped to ideal
multi-source spreading, we leverage the behavioral patterns of users extracted
from data to construct "virtual" information spreading processes. Our results
demonstrate that the set of spreaders selected by CI can induce larger scale of
information propagation. Moreover, local measures as the number of connections
or citations are not necessarily the deterministic factors of nodes' importance
in realistic information spreading. This result has significance for rankings
scientists in scientific networks like the APS, where the commonly used number
of citations can be a poor indicator of the collective influence of authors in
the community.Comment: 11 pages, 4 figure
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