Related papers: Can we track the geography of surnames based on bi…
The study of surnames as both linguistic and geographical markers of the past has proven valuable in several research fields spanning from biology and genetics to demography and social mobility. This article builds upon the existing…
Bayesian Improved Surname Geocoding (BISG) is a ubiquitous tool for predicting race and ethnicity using an individual's geolocation and surname. Here we demonstrate that statistical dependence of surname and geolocation within racial/ethnic…
Computational social scientists often harness the Web as a "societal observatory" where data about human social behavior is collected. This data enables novel investigations of psychological, anthropological and sociological research…
To answer questions about racial inequality and fairness, we often need a way to infer race and ethnicity from names. One way to infer race and ethnicity from names is by relying on the Census Bureau's list of popular last names. The list,…
Surnames and nonrecombining alleles are inherited from a single parent in a highly similar way. A simple birth-death model with mutations can accurately describe this process. Exponentially growing and constant populations are investigated,…
We examine the problem of family size statistics (the number of individuals carrying the same surname, or the same DNA sequence) in a given size subsample of an exponentially growing population. We approach the problem from two directions.…
We linked names and contact information to publicly available profiles in the Personal Genome Project. These profiles contain medical and genomic information, including details about medications, procedures and diseases, and demographic…
A bibliometric approach is explored to tracking international scientific migration, based on an analysis of the affiliation countries of authors publishing in peer reviewed journals indexed in Scopus. The paper introduces a model that…
Bayesian Improved Surname Geocoding (BISG) is the most popular method for proxying race/ethnicity in voter registration files that do not contain it. This paper benchmarks BISG against a range of previously untested machine learning…
We provide the largest compiled publicly available dictionaries of first, middle, and last names for the purpose of imputing race and ethnicity using, for example, Bayesian Improved Surname Geocoding (BISG). The dictionaries are based on…
Much attention has been given to the task of gender inference of Twitter users. Although names are strong gender indicators, the names of Twitter users are rarely used as a feature; probably due to the high number of ill-formed names, which…
In this study, the historical roots of tribology are investigated using a newly developed scientometric method called Referenced Publication Years Spectroscopy. The study is based on cited references in tribology research publications. The…
Demographic inference from text has received a surge of attention in the field of natural language processing in the last decade. In this paper, we use personal names to infer religion in South Asia - where religion is a salient social…
This paper presents and describes the methodological opportunities offered by bibliometric data to produce indicators of scientific mobility. Large bibliographic datasets of disambiguated authors and their affiliations allow for the…
Prior investigations have offered contrasting results on a troubling question: whether the alphabetical ordering of bylines confers citation advantages on those authors whose surnames put them first in the list. The previous studies…
Racial disparity in academia is a widely acknowledged problem. The quantitative understanding of racial based systemic inequalities is an important step towards a more equitable research system. However, because of the lack of robust…
Demographic classification is essential in fairness assessment in recommender systems or in measuring unintended bias in online networks and voting systems. Important fields like education and politics, which often lay a foundation for the…
Driven by the popularity of television shows such as Who Do You Think You Are? many millions of users have uploaded their family tree to web projects such as WikiTree. Analysis of this corpus enables us to investigate genealogy…
Genetic data are now routinely used to study the history of population size, subdivision, and gene flow. A variety of formal statistical methods is available for testing hypotheses and fitting models to data. Yet it is often unclear which…
Bibliometrics has the ambitious goal of measuring science. To this end, it exploits the way science is disseminated trough scientific publications and the resulting citation network of scientific papers. We survey the main historical…