Related papers: Scientific wealth and inequality within nations
The pursuit of knowledge is the permanent goal of human beings. Scientific literature, as the major medium that carries knowledge between scientists, exhibits explosive growth during the last century. Despite the frequent use of many…
World University rankings have become well-established tools that students, university managers and policy makers read and use. Each ranking claims to have a unique methodology capable of measuring the 'quality' of universities. The purpose…
This work bridges the technical concepts underlying distributed computing and blockchain technologies with their profound socioeconomic and sociopolitical implications, particularly on academic research and the healthcare industry. Several…
In recent years scholars have built maps of science by connecting the academic fields that cite each other, are cited together, or that cite a similar literature. But since scholars cannot always publish in the fields they cite, or that…
Citations are widely considered in scientists' evaluation. As such, scientists may be incentivized to inflate their citation counts. While previous literature has examined self-citations and citation cartels, it remains unclear whether…
Structural inequalities persist in society, conferring systematic advantages to some people at the expense of others, for example, by giving them substantially more influence and opportunities. Using bibliometric data about authors of…
The Internet-based encyclopaedia Wikipedia has grown to become one of the most visited web-sites on the Internet. However, critics have questioned the quality of entries, and an empirical study has shown Wikipedia to contain errors in a…
Philosophers of science have long postulated how collective scientific knowledge grows. Empirical validation has been challenging due to limitations in collecting and systematizing large historical records. Here, we capitalize on the…
The number of citations is a widely used metric to evaluate the scientific credit of papers, scientists and journals. However, it does happen that a paper with fewer citations from prestigious scientists is of higher influence than papers…
We consider a simple theoretical model to investigate the impact of inheritances on the wealth distribution. Wealth is described as a finite resource, which remains constant over different generations and is divided equally among offspring.…
Modern information and communication technologies, especially the Internet, have diminished the role of spatial distances and territorial boundaries on the access and transmissibility of information. This has enabled scientists for closer…
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.…
As research becomes an ever more globalized activity, there is growing interest in national and international comparisons of standards and quality in different countries and regions. A sign for this trend is the increasing interest in…
Many nations are adopting higher education strategies that emphasize the development of elite universities able to compete at the international level in the attraction of skills and resources. Elite universities pursue excellence in all…
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…
Mounting evidences are being gathered suggesting that income and wealth distribution in various countries or societies follow a robust pattern, close to the Gibbs distribution of energy in an ideal gas in equilibrium, but also deviating…
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…
One way of evaluating individual scientists is the determination of the number of highly cited publications, where the threshold is given by a large reference set. It is shown that this indicator behaves in a counterintuitive way, leading…
The research assessments of countries or institutions should reveal their contribution to the advancement of science. Taking into consideration the correlation that exists between scientific impact and number of citations, research…
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…