The diffusion of scientific discovery
tchristos.com
tchristos.com
> Title: Prestige drives epistemic inequality in the diffusion of scientific ideas
> Abstract: 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. However, relatively little is known about how structural factors influence the spread of ideas, and specifically how where an idea originates might influence how it spreads. Here, we investigate the role of faculty hiring networks, which embody the set of researcher transitions from doctoral to faculty institutions, in shaping the spread of ideas in computer science, and the importance of where in the network an idea originates. We consider comprehensive data on the hiring events of 5032 faculty at all 205 Ph.D.-granting departments of computer science in the U.S. and Canada, and on the timing and titles of 200,476 associated publications. Analyzing five popular research topics, we show empirically that faculty hiring can and does facilitate the spread of ideas in science. Having established such a mechanism, we then analyze its potential consequences using epidemic models to simulate the generic spread of research ideas and quantify the impact of where an idea originates on its longterm diffusion across the network. We find that research from prestigious institutions spreads more quickly and completely than work of similar quality originating from less prestigious institutions. Our analyses establish the theoretical trade-offs between university prestige and the quality of ideas necessary for efficient circulation. Our results establish faculty hiring as an underlying mechanism that drives the persistent epistemic advantage observed for elite institutions, and provide a theoretical lower bound for the impact of structural inequality in shaping the spread of ideas in science.
That's a bit of a leap though, isn't it? How to establish that the works are of 'similar quality'?
basically just references a bunch of other works.
One way of quality measurement is with the benefit of time I suppose - which would also be the way you would have the best metrics for idea diffusion.
If the future is already here just not evenly distributed yet it follows that what is evenly distributed now at some point in the past was unevenly distributed. With a good enough paper trail, which scientific publications provide, we could have a model of the distribution of these ideas that we believe, with the benefit of hindsight, are of similar quality.
Some possible feedback loops:
Well known universities have more funds available and will be able to attract the best teachers away from the lesser universities.
Researchers may be willing to cite work from well known universities over similar work done at lesser universities.
The work done at other universities may be in a language that the researchers are not familiar with.
And so on. Quality in a vacuum is a very precise term but in the real world you'd have to discount for all of those factors.
In the tech world we have a similar example: Silicon Valley is 'where it happens' because it has a head start that is impossible to compete with which automatically attracts new talent and funding to a degree that it starves locations elsewhere resulting in an equality that dwarfs any qualitative effects that you may want to measure.
>Well known universities have more funds available and will be able to attract the best teachers away from the lesser universities.
if we see that the work 20 years ago at a lesser known university was of the same quality as the work at a well known one, then I don't really get your argument about the money?
>Researchers may be willing to cite work from well known universities over similar work done at lesser universities.
which would really be confirming the argument that similar levels of quality get treated differently given their source.
I think the two most important quotes being:
“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.”
“We find that research from prestigious institutions spreads more quickly and completely than work of similar quality originating from less prestigious institutions.”
The simplest mathematical model of this might be a Levy flight [1].
One could, for instance, design the shape of the labyrinth such that most of the little jiggling dots not only can't make their way out, but also get trapped in a direction very far from the actual truth.
I hope that the random nature of the universe takes it a little easier on us than that.
and I imagine the closer the academic research is to real world industry uses, the more obstacles there will be (due to 'trade secrecy', and the like)