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Science of science (SciSci) is an emerging discipline wherein science is used to study the structure and evolution of science itself using large data sets. The increasing availability of digital data on scholarly outcomes offers…
Rationality is often related to optimal decision making. Humans are known to be bounded rational agents. However, recent advances in computing, and other scientific and technical fields along with large amount of data have led to a feeling…
The ability to attract and retain talented professors is a distinctive competence of world-class universities and a source of competitive advantage. The ratio of top scientists to academic staff could therefore be an indicator of the…
This paper overviews the economics of scientific grants, focusing on the interplay between the inherent uncertainty in research, researchers' incentives, and grant design. Grants differ from traditional market systems and other science and…
Scholars present their new research at seminars and conferences, and send drafts to peers, hoping to receive comments and suggestions that will improve the quality of their work. Using a dataset of papers published in economics journals,…
Managers regularly face a complex ethical dilemma over how to best govern online communities by evaluating the effectiveness of different social or technical strategies. What ethical considerations should guide researchers and managers when…
Nobel Prizes are commonly seen to be among the most prestigious achievements of our times. Based on mining several million citations, we quantitatively analyze the processes driving paradigm shifts in science. We find that groundbreaking…
An increasing number of nations allocate public funds to research institutions on the basis of rankings obtained from national evaluation exercises. Therefore, in non-competitive higher education systems where top scientists are dispersed…
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…
In contrast to many other scientific disciplines, computer science considers conference publications. Conferences have the advantage of providing fast publication of papers and of bringing researchers together to present and discuss the…
A common flaw of astronomers is to believe that they know the truth even when data is scarce. I provide ten examples where this approach led to wrong strategic decisions in research plans, causing unnecessary delays in finding the truth. In…
The American scientific community is reeling from funding cuts and policy directives that will debilitate scientific research and education. The underlying hostilities fueling these attacks have intensified in recent years as the COVID-19…
Scientists in some fields are concerned that many, or even most, published results are false. A high rate of false positives might arise accidentally, from shoddy research practices. Or it might be the inevitable result of institutional…
Peer review is an integral component of contemporary science. While peer review focuses attention on promising and interesting science, it also encourages scientists to pursue some questions at the expense of others. Here, we use ideas from…
Scholars have long hypothesized that democratic forms of government are more compatible with scientific advancement. However, empirical analysis testing the democracy-science compatibility hypothesis remains underdeveloped. This article…
Science has traditionally played an important role in sharing knowledge among people. Particle Physics, with its large experiments, has shown that one not only can share the knowledge among different cultures, but that one can also work…
Machine learning and deep learning techniques are contributing much to the advancement of science. Their powerful predictive capabilities appear in numerous disciplines, including chaotic dynamics, but they miss understanding. The main…
Overconfidence is a prevalent problem and particularly consequential in its relation with scientific knowledge: being unaware of one`s own ignorance can affect behaviours and threaten public policies and health. We introduce both analytical…
This study is about public-private research collaboration. In particular, we want to measure how the propensity of academics to collaborate with their colleagues from private firms varies over time and whether the typical profile of such…
Understanding the collective dynamics behind the success of ideas, products, behaviors, and social actors is critical for decision-making across diverse contexts, including hiring, funding, career choices, and the design of interventions…