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Homophily, the tendency of individuals to associate with others who share similar traits, has been identified as a major driving force in the formation and evolution of social ties. In many cases, it is not clear if homophily is the result…

Understanding determinants of success in academic careers is critically important to both scholars and their employing organizations. While considerable research efforts have been made in this direction, there is still a lack of a…

Different kinds of "gender gap" have been reported in different walks of the scientific life, almost always favouring male scientists over females. In this work, for the first time, we present a large-scale empirical analysis to ask whether…

Performance in introductory courses, particularly physics, is often crucial for student success in STEM majors and can impact an individual's tendency to persist in their chosen field. To enhance students' individual learning experiences,…

Throughout history, a relatively small number of individuals have made a profound and lasting impact on science and society. Despite long-standing, multi-disciplinary interests in understanding careers of elite scientists, there have been…

Citations play an important role in researchers' careers as a key factor in evaluation of scientific impact. Many anecdotes advice authors to exploit this fact and cite prospective reviewers to try obtaining a more positive evaluation for…

Establishing an independent academic identity is a central yet insufficiently understood challenge for early-career researchers. However, limited resources and mentor-driven research agendas often constrain early efforts toward autonomy. To…

Academic esteem is difficult to quantify in objective terms. Network theory offers the opportunity to use a mathematical formalism to model both the esteem associated with an academic and the relationships between academic colleagues. Early…

In this investigation, we analyzed individual interviews with six female undergraduate physics majors at a large, public, research university in the US to understand their progression at different transition points to becoming physicists.…

Underrepresentation in STEM fields starts early, with elementary students already showing differences based on gender and race in their interest in science, belief in their ability to do science, and belief that their personal identity…

For decades the number of scientific publications has been rapidly increasing, effectively out-dating knowledge at a tremendous rate. Only few scientific milestones remain relevant and continuously attract citations. Here we quantify how…

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…

Many previous causal inference studies require no interference, that is, the potential outcomes of a unit do not depend on the treatments of other units. However, this no-interference assumption becomes unreasonable when a unit interacts…

Despite strong evidence for peer effects, little is known about how individuals balance intrinsic preferences and social learning in different choice environments. Using a combination of experiments and discrete choice modeling, we show…

Narrative reviews of peer review research have concluded that there is negligible evidence of gender bias in the awarding of grants based on peer review. Here, we report the findings of a meta-analysis of 21 studies providing, to the…

Acknowledgements in scientific articles suggest not only gratitude, but also the interactions among scientists. In this study, we examine the acknowledgement interactions employing data from open-access journals (PLOS series). We built an…

Investigations related to expertise in problem solving and ability to transfer learning from one context to another are important for developing strategies to help students perform more expert-like tasks. Here we analyze written responses…

Joining a research group is one of the most important events on a graduate student's path to earning a PhD, but the ways students go about searching for a group remain largely unstudied. It is therefore crucial to investigate whether…

Women from historically marginalized groups in the sciences continue to be severely underrepresented in the fields of physics and astronomy. Young girls identifying with these groups often lose interest in science, technology, engineering,…

Engaging in interactions with peers is important for student learning. Many studies have quantified patterns of student interactions in in-person physics courses using social network analysis, finding different network structures between…