Title: "How much of a meritocracy? Untangling the drivers of productivity and prominence among scientists"

Presented by: Aaron Clauset, University of Colorado, Boulder Department of Computer Science

Host: Andrew Lucas

Colloquium Date: November 29, 2023

Abstract: Simple measures of the productivity and prominence vary enormously across both individual scientists and across institutions. But, how much do these sometimes enormous inequalities represent genuine meritocratic differences, and how much are they biased by non-meritocratic factors that may limit scientific progress?
This talk will untangle some of the underlying drivers of differences in scientific productivity and prominence. First, we'll ask, how much of an individual's productivity (how many papers they publish) can be attributed to inherent skill vs. environmental advantages. Second, we'll ask, what drives where a scientist works? Then, we'll ask, what role do social networks and social capital play in shaping an individual scientist's productivity and prominence within their field? In this last section, we'll use two network-based generative models that can untangle these two measures from a scientist's collaboration network, and allow us to evaluate how gendered differences in social networks relate to gendered differences in productivity and prominence, and the degree to which social networks might be inheritable from advisors to advisees. I'll close with a discussion of how knowing the systemic and structural sources of bias in science can help us reconnect with our meritocratic principles, to both diversify the academy and broaden its contributions to society.

Aaron Clauset is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science and the BioFrontiers Institute at the University of Colorado Boulder, and is External Faculty at the Santa Fe Institute. He received a PhD in Computer Science, with distinction, from the University of New Mexico, a BS in Physics, with honors, from Haverford College, and was an Omidyar Fellow at the prestigious Santa Fe Institute. He was awarded the Erdos-Renyi Prize in Network Science in 2016, and was named a Fellow of the Network Science Society in 2023. Since 2017, he has been a Deputy Editor responsible for the Social, Computing, and Interdisciplinary Sciences at Science Advances.

Clauset is an internationally recognized expert on network science, data science, and machine learning for complex systems. His research program is around two general themes: identifying fundamental principles of the organization and behavior of complex social and biological systems, and developing approaches for using data and computation to illuminate those ideas. A recent major focus of this work has been on the "science of science," where he studies the shape, origins, and consequences of social and epistemic inequalities on scientific careers, productivity, the spread of ideas, and the composition of the scientific workforce. His research results have appeared in many prestigious scientific venues, including Nature, Science, PNAS, SIAM Review, Science Advances, Nature Communications, and Physical Review Letters. His work has been covered in the popular press by Quanta Magazine, the Wall Street Journal, The Economist, Discover Magazine, Wired, the Boston Globe and The Guardian.

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