Related papers: Rethinking Resource Allocation in Science
Artificial intelligence (AI) is being increasingly applied to scientific research, but its benefits remain unevenly distributed across different communities and disciplines. While technical challenges such as limited data, fragmented…
Access to resources strongly constrains the decisions we make. While we might wish to offer every student a scholarship, or schedule every patient for follow-up meetings with a specialist, limited resources mean that this is not possible.…
Gender bias in grant allocation is a deviation from the principle that scientific merit should guide grant decisions. However, most studies on gender bias in grant allocation focus on gender differences in success rates, without including…
A country's research success can be assessed from the power law function that links country and world rank numbers when publications are ordered by their number of citations; a similar function describes the distribution of country papers…
A simulation model based on parallel systems is established, aiming to explore the relation between the number of submissions and the overall standard of academic journals within a similar discipline under peer review. The model can…
Scientific publishing seems to be at a turning point. Its paradigm has stayed basically the same for 300 years but is now challenged by the increasing volume of articles that makes it very hard for scientists to stay up to date in their…
Assessing the research performance of multi-disciplinary institutions, where scientists belong to many fields, requires that the evaluators plan how to aggregate the performance measures of the various fields. Two methods of aggregation are…
We provide an example of the application of quantitative techniques, tools, and topics from mathematics and data science to analyze the mathematics community itself in order to quantify and document inequity in our discipline. This work is…
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…
A `peer-review system' in the context of judging research contributions, is one of the prime steps undertaken to ensure the quality of the submissions received, a significant portion of the publishing budget is spent towards successful…
Existing norms for scientific communication are rooted in anachronistic practices of bygone eras, making them needlessly inefficient. We outline a path that moves away from the existing model of scientific communication to improve the…
We examine the innovation of researchers with long-lived careers in Computer Science and Physics. Despite the epistemological differences between such disciplines, we consistently find that a researcher's most innovative publication occurs…
Tenure is a cornerstone of the US academic system, yet its relationship to faculty research trajectories remains poorly understood. Conceptually, tenure systems may act as a selection mechanism, screening in high-output researchers; a…
The increasing volume of scientific publications and grant proposals has generated an unprecedentedly high workload to scientific communities. Consequently, review quality has been decreasing and review outcomes have become less correlated…
A key decision in scientific work is whether to build on novel or well-established ideas. Because exploiting new ideas is often harder than more conventional science, novel work can be especially dependent on interactions with colleagues,…
The ongoing artificial intelligence (AI) revolution has the potential to change almost every line of work. As AI capabilities continue to improve in accuracy, robustness, and reach, AI may outperform and even replace human experts across…
It is a matter of debate whether a shrinking proportion of scholarly literature is getting most of the references over time. It is also less well understood how a narrowing literature usage would affect the circulation of ideas in the…
In this paper we show that the dramatic increase in the number of research articles indexed in the Web of Science database impacts the commonly observed distributions of citations within these articles. First, we document that the growing…
The literature on gender differences in research performance seems to suggest a gap between men and women, where the former outperform the latter. Whether one agrees with the different factors proposed to explain the phenomenon, it is…
Strategic behavior is a fundamental problem in a variety of real-world applications that require some form of peer assessment, such as peer grading of homeworks, grant proposal review, conference peer review of scientific papers, and peer…