Tag
matthew effect
10 posts tagged matthew-effect.
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Does your PhD's pedigree decide your career more than your papers do?
A 2022 Nature study of 238,676 professors finds 80% trained at just 20% of universities, five schools produced one in eight, and only 5 to 23% ever work somewhere more prestigious than their PhD. What that means if you didn't train at an elite school.
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Why do some papers keep getting cited, and most don't?
A January 2025 preprint argues papers keep getting cited less because of intrinsic quality and more because of where their research community's attention drifts, explaining sleeping beauties that rich-get-richer models cannot.
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Is the 'world's top 2% scientists' list measuring merit or geography?
A 2025 Journal of Informetrics study of Stanford's 'World's Top 2% Scientists' list in legal studies finds it tracks a US postal code about as closely as it tracks merit.
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The man who studied delayed recognition, and then suffered it
Eugene Garfield coined 'delayed recognition' for papers the world ignores for years. A 2025 preprint shows his own paper on it sat almost uncited for 28 years.
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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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Where is my $400,000?
Barabási's The Formula prices a citation at about $100,000. That number is an average over a power-law distribution, so most citations are worth far less and a few are worth fortunes. What your next citation is worth depends on where you sit.
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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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It's not the Matthew effect. It's the Daniel effect.
Early success predicts later success — Merton called it the Matthew effect. Why AI doesn't level the field the way it appears to, and what to do about a cold start with no audience.
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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.