Category
Science of Science
9 posts.
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Why your biggest paper hasn't happened yet
The single biggest paper of a scientific career lands at a random point in it, and the only requirement is that you were still publishing when it arrived. Here is why that means you should not quit.
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Citation inequality is widening, which is why 'above average' isn't the target
By 2015 the top 1% of scientists captured 21% of all citations, up from 14% in 2000. As attention concentrates, being good enough guarantees nothing. Here is why deliberate visibility matters more every year.
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How academic careers actually work
Nobody trains you for the half of academic work that decides your career: making sure the right people know your work exists. Here is why that is a feature of the system, not a bug, and the fourth way to respond to it.
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Same song, different universe: what a music experiment says about your citations
A 2006 music experiment ran the same songs through eight parallel worlds. The same track was a hit in one and a flop in another. Here is what that says about why some papers get cited and others vanish.
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Why your acquaintances, not your closest friends, bring you the next opportunity
Granovetter's 'strength of weak ties': most useful job leads come from acquaintances you see rarely, not your closest circle. How to put yourself near the next opportunity.
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Why the wording of your abstract affects how often you get cited
A 136,615-paper study found that abstracts with more promotional language drew more citations, views, and media coverage — even within Nature, Science, and PNAS.
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LLMs sharpen the Matthew effect in citations
LLMs asked to suggest references favor already-highly-cited papers, reproducing the Matthew effect in citations. Treat the first references a model suggests as a starting list, not the final one.
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Where you debut probably decides where you stay
A network study of nearly 500,000 artists shows the first five exhibitions predict the next thirty. The same gatekeeper dynamics shape any institutional career — choose your first move carefully.
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Promoted papers keep pulling ahead: what the Kudlow RCT looks like at 36 months
A randomized controlled trial (Kudlow, Brown & Eysenbach, JMIR 2021) shows six months of cheap paper promotion produced a citation gap that kept widening for three years after the promotion stopped.