Related papers: Scientific productivity as a random walk
Research teams are the fundamental social unit of science, and yet there is currently no model that describes their basic property: size. In most fields teams have grown significantly in recent decades. We show that this is partly due to…
Elite economics PhD programs aim to train graduate students for a lifetime of academic research. This paper asks how advising affects graduate students' post-PhD research productivity. Advising is highly concentrated: at the eight…
Scientific publications enable results and ideas to be transmitted throughout the scientific community. The number and type of journal publications also have become the primary criteria used in evaluating career advancement. Our analysis…
Academic migration is the change of host institution by a researcher, typically aimed at achieving a stronger research profile. Scientific features such as the number of collaborations, the productivity and its research impact tend to be…
There is a worldwide trend towards application of bibliometric research evaluation, in support of the needs of policy makers and research administrators. However the assumptions and limitations of bibliometric measurements suggest a…
The mobility of scientists between different universities and countries is important to foster knowledge exchange. At the same time, the potential mobility is restricted by geographic and institutional constraints, which leads to temporal…
In this research, we analyze the relationship between publishing productivity and access to highly prestigious journals, treating publishing in top journals as a stratification mechanism selecting publishing elites. We study N = 144,314…
Current practices of quantifying performance by productivity leads serious concerns for psychological well-being of doctoral students and influence of research environment is often neglected in research evaluations. Acknowledgements in…
Scientific and technological frontiers advance through punctuated dynamics, yet the principles governing these dynamics remain poorly understood. Here we collect and analyze datasets tracking the evolution of frontiers across 9 different…
Statistical distributions with heavy tails are ubiquitous in natural and social phenomena. Since the entries in heavy tail have disproportional significance, the knowledge of its exact shape is very important. Citations of scientific papers…
The exponential increase in the number of scientific publications raises the question of whether the sciences are expanding into a fractured structure, making cross-field communication difficult. On the other hand, scientists may be…
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,…
Despite broad acclaim for basic research, science is undergoing an applied shift that marginalizes basic scientists. This gap reflects an incomplete understanding of their distinctive roles, which prevents translating philosophical…
Scientific contributions are a direct reflection of a research paper's value, illustrating its impact on existing theories or practices. Existing measurement methods assess contributions based on the authors' perceived or self-identified…
Although the computer science community successfully harnessed exponential increases in computer performance to drive societal and economic change, the exponential growth in publications is proving harder to accommodate. To gain a deeper…
We propose a new citation model which builds on the existing models that explicitly or implicitly include "direct" and "indirect" (learning about a cited paper's existence from references in another paper) citation mechanisms. Our model…
Faculty hiring shapes the flow of ideas, resources, and opportunities in academia, influencing not only individual career trajectories but also broader patterns of institutional prestige and scientific progress. While traditional studies…
We introduce a new survey of professors at roughly 150 of the most research-intensive institutions of higher education in the US. We document seven new features of how research-active professors are compensated, how they spend their time,…
Understanding the relationship between the composition of a research team and the potential impact of their research papers is crucial as it can steer the development of new science policies for improving the research enterprise. Numerous…
In multiple academic disciplines, having a perceived gender of `woman' is associated with a lower than expected rate of citations. In some fields, that disparity is driven primarily by the citations of men and is increasing over time…