Related papers: Persistence and Uncertainty in the Academic Career
Many complex phenomena, from the selection of traits in biological systems to hierarchy formation in social and economic entities, show signs of competition and heterogeneous performance in the temporal evolution of their components, which…
The development of inventions is theorized as a process of searching and recombining existing knowledge components. Previous studies under this theory have examined myriad characteristics of recombined knowledge and their performance…
In multiple academic disciplines, having a perceived gender of `woman' is associated with a lower than expected rate of citations. In some fields, that disparity is driven primarily by the citations of men and is increasing over time…
We develop a method to estimate producers' productivity beliefs when output quantities and input prices are unobservable, and we use it to evaluate the market for science. Our model of researchers' labor supply shows how their willingness…
The work applies the funnel plot methodology to measure and visualize uncertainty in the research performance of Italian universities in the science disciplines. The performance assessment is carried out at both discipline and overall…
Mentoring is a key component of scientific achievements, contributing to overall measures of career success for mentees and mentors. A common success metric in the scientific enterprise is acquiring a large research group, which is believed…
Current practices of quantifying performance by productivity leads serious concerns for psychological well-being of doctoral students and influence of research environment is often neglected in research evaluations. Acknowledgements in…
We present a comprehensive parametric analysis of node and edge lifetimes processes in two large-scale collaboration networks: the Microsoft Academic Graph (1800-2020) and Internet Movie Database (1900-2020). Node and edge lifetimes (career…
Reproducibility is an important feature of science; experiments are retested, and analyses are repeated. Trust in the findings increases when consistent results are achieved. Despite the importance of reproducibility, significant work is…
The COVID-19 pandemic necessitated social distancing at every level of society, including universities and research institutes, raising essential questions concerning the continuing importance of physical proximity for scientific and…
New ideas are often thought to arise from recombining existing knowledge. Yet despite rapid publication growth - and expanding opportunities for recombination - scientific breakthroughs remain rare. This gap between productivity and…
Innovation or the creation and diffusion of new material, social and cultural things in society has been widely studied in sociology and across the social sciences, with investigations sufficiently diverse and dispersed to make them…
Science is a cumulative activity, which can manifest itself through the act of citing. Citations are also central to research evaluation, thus creating incentives for researchers to cite their own work. Using a dataset containing more than…
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…
We use an information-theoretic measure of linguistic similarity to investigate the organization and evolution of scientific fields. An analysis of almost 20M papers from the past three decades reveals that the linguistic similarity is…
Science prizes purportedly reward innovation and explorations of new phenomena. Yet, in practice prizes may inadvertently divert resources from similarly impactful but less celebrated scholars. Despite this paradox, knowledge of how…
Policy makers and managers sometimes assess the share of research produced by a group (country, department, institution). This takes the form of the percentage of publications in a journal, field or broad area that has been published by the…
In this work we investigate the determinants of professors' career advancement in Italian universities. From the analyses, it emerges that the fundamental determinant of an academic candidate's success is not scientific merit, but rather…
Academic success is distributed unequally; a few top scientists receive the bulk of attention, citations, and resources. However, do these ``superstars" foster leadership in scientific innovation? We introduce three information-theoretic…
Scientific authorship norms vary dramatically across disciplines, from contribution-sensitive systems where first author is the greatest contributor and subsequent author order reflects relative input, to contribution-insensitive…