Tag
science of science
14 posts tagged science-of-science.
-
Is the paper you're reading even real?
A November 2025 Royal Society Open Science Perspective, the Stockholm Declaration, argues fake and low-quality science is now produced at industrial scale, with hundreds of thousands of paper-mill articles a year.
-
Is your hot streak also your most disruptive streak?
A 2025 study of 21,271 economists finds papers published during a researcher's hot streak are also more disruptive, and the boldest work tends to arrive years before the most-cited work.
-
Small teams disrupt? Maybe it was never about size
A new arXiv preprint argues that collaboration synergy, not team size, drives disruptive science, revisiting the well-known 'small teams disrupt, large teams develop' finding.
-
Is science really running out of disruption?
A 2026 Research Policy paper argues the famous 'science is becoming less disruptive' finding measures the wrong thing, especially in the social sciences.
-
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.
-
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.
-
The credit problem in team science
Teams produce most of the research impact, but one author takes most of the credit. If you are a middle author, the publication itself will not make your contribution visible. Here is what to do about it.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.