Related papers: Some scientific knowledge is a dangerous thing: ov…
Epistemic Uncertainty is a measure of the lack of knowledge of a learner which diminishes with more evidence. While existing work focuses on using the variance of the Bayesian posterior due to parameter uncertainty as a measure of epistemic…
When people receive new information, sometimes they revise their beliefs too much, and sometimes too little. In this paper, we show that a key driver of whether people overinfer or underinfer is the strength of the information. Based on a…
Artificial intelligence (AI) models trained on published scientific findings have been used to invent valuable materials and targeted therapies, but they typically ignore the human scientists who continually alter the landscape of…
Science is a growing system, exhibiting ~4% annual growth in publications and ~1.8% annual growth in the number of references per publication. Combined these trends correspond to a 12-year doubling period in the total supply of references,…
Traditional closed peer review systems, which have played a central role in scientific publishing, are often slow, costly, non-transparent, stochastic, and possibly subject to biases - factors that can impede scientific progress and…
Science is built on the scholarly consensus that shifts with time. This raises the question of how new and revolutionary ideas are evaluated and become accepted into the canon of science. Using two recently proposed metrics, we identify…
Why do firms produce scientific research and make it available to the public, including their rivals? Prior literature has emphasized the tension between imitation risks from disclosure and scientists' preferences for publication. This…
Computer science research has led to many breakthrough innovations but has also been scrutinized for enabling technology that has negative, unintended consequences for society. Given the increasing discussions of ethics in the news and…
In the era of big science, many national governments are helping to build well-funded teams of scientists to serve nationalistic ambitions, providing financial incentives for certain outcomes for purposes other than advancing science. That…
How does the extent to which a model is open or closed impact the scientific inferences that can be drawn from research that involves it? In this paper, we analyze how restrictions on information about model construction and deployment…
Consistent confirmations obtained independently of each other lend credibility to a scientific result. We refer to results satisfying this consistency as reproducible and assume that reproducibility is a desirable property of scientific…
While traditionally not considered part of the scientific method, science communication is increasingly playing a pivotal role in shaping scientific practice. Researchers are now frequently compelled to publicise their findings in response…
Despite the importance of social science knowledge for various stakeholders, measuring its diffusion into different domains remains a challenge. This study uses a novel text-based approach to measure the idea-level diffusion of social…
This essay, written by a statistician and a climate scientist, describes our view of the gap that exists between current practice in mainstream climate science, and the practical needs of policymakers charged with exploring possible…
Ageing of publications, percentage of self-citations, and impact vary from journal to journal within fields of science. The assumption that citation and publication practices are homogenous within specialties and fields of science is…
The technological revolution of the Internet has digitized the social, economic, political, and cultural activities of billions of humans. While researchers have been paying due attention to concerns of misinformation and bias, these…
The influence of the social relationships of an individual on the individual's opinions (about a topic, a product, or whatever else) is a well known phenomenon and it has been widely studied. This paper considers a network of positive (i.e.…
Emerging information technologies like social media, search engines, and AI can have a broad impact on public health, political institutions, social dynamics, and the natural world. It is critical to develop a scientific understanding of…
Scientific knowledge develops through cumulative discoveries that build on, contradict, contextualize, or correct prior findings. Scientists and journalists often communicate these incremental findings to lay people through visualizations…
Nations can be distinguished in terms of whether domestic or international research is cited. We analyzed the research output in natural sciences of three leading European research economies (Germany, the Netherlands, and the UK) and ask…