Related papers: Estimating achievement from fame
Although not explicitly declared, most research rankings of countries and institutions are supposed to reveal their contribution to the advancement of knowledge. However, such advances are based on very highly cited publications with very…
Ranking is a ubiquitous phenomenon in the human society. By clicking the web pages of Forbes, you may find all kinds of rankings, such as world's most powerful people, world's richest people, top-paid tennis stars, and so on and so forth.…
Reward schemes may affect not only agents' effort, but also their incentives to gather information to reduce the riskiness of the productive activity. In a laboratory experiment using a novel task, we find that the relationship between…
A method is presented for evaluating authors on the basis of citations. It assigns to each author a citation score which depends upon the number of times he is cited, and upon the scores of the citers. The scores are found to be the…
We propose a comprehensive bibliometric study of the profile of Nobel prizewinners in chemistry and physics from 1901 to 2007, based on citation data available over the same period. The data allows us to observe the evolution of the…
We consider the problem of imitation learning from a finite set of expert trajectories, without access to reinforcement signals. The classical approach of extracting the expert's reward function via inverse reinforcement learning, followed…
Collaboration among researchers is an essential component of the modern scientific enterprise, playing a particularly important role in multidisciplinary research. However, we continue to wrestle with allocating credit to the coauthors of…
In business, politics and life, folk wisdom encourages people to aim for above-average results, but to not let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Here, we mathematically formalize and extend this folk wisdom. We model a time-limited…
In many professons employees are rewarded according to their relative performance. Corresponding economy can be modeled by taking $N$ independent agents who gain from the market with a rate which depends on their current gain. We argue that…
Scientific prizes are among the greatest recognition a scientist receives from their peers and arguably shape the direction of a field by conferring credibility to persons, ideas, and disciplines, providing financial rewards, and promoting…
The status of an actor in a social context is commonly defined in terms of two factors: the total number of endorsements the actor receives from other actors and the prestige of the endorsing actors. These two factors indicate the…
We propose measures of the impact of research that improve on existing ones such as counting of number of papers, citations and $h$-index. Since different papers and different fields have largely different average number of co-authors and…
We show that the greater the scientific wealth of a nation, the more likely that it will tend to concentrate this excellence in a few premier institutions. That is, great wealth implies great inequality of distribution. The scientific…
Despite the increasing use of citation-based metrics for research evaluation purposes, we do not know yet which metrics best deliver on their promise to gauge the significance of a scientific paper or a patent. We assess 17 network-based…
Peer influence on effort devoted to some activity is often studied when effort is unobserved, and the researcher instead observes an outcome that combines effort with other shocks. For instance, in education, achievement measures such as…
We present a new way of estimation of the role of chance in achieving success, by comparing the empirical data from 100-meter dash competitions (one of the sports disciplines with the most stringent controls of external randomness), with…
We review our recent work on applying the Google PageRank algorithm to find scientific "gems" among all Physical Review publications, and its extension to CiteRank, to find currently popular research directions. These metrics provide a…
How can one efficiently share payoffs with collaborators when participating in risky research? First, I show that efficiency can be achieved by allocating payoffs asymmetrically between the researcher who makes a breakthrough ("winner") and…
Did celebrity last longer in 1929, 1992 or 2009? We investigate the phenomenon of fame by mining a collection of news articles that spans the twentieth century, and also perform a side study on a collection of blog posts from the last 10…
Truth discovery is a general name for a broad range of statistical methods aimed to extract the correct answers to questions, based on multiple answers coming from noisy sources. For example, workers in a crowdsourcing platform. In this…