Collective Attention towards Scientists and Research Topics
Pages 11 - 15
Abstract
Emergent patterns of collective attention towards scientists and their research may function as a proxy for scientific impact which traditionally is assessed via committees that award prizes to scientists. Therefore it is crucial to understand the relationships between scientific impact and online demand and supply for information about scientists and their work. In this paper, we compare the temporal pattern of information supply (article creations) and information demand (article views) on Wikipedia for two groups of scientists: scientists who received one of the most prestigious awards in their field and influential scientists from the same field who did not receive an award. Our research highlights that awards function as external shocks which increase supply and demand for information about scientists, but hardly affect information supply and demand for their research topics. Further, we find interesting differences in the temporal ordering of information supply between the two groups: (i) award-winners have a higher probability that interest in them precedes interest in their work; (ii) for award winners interest in articles about them and their work is temporally more clustered than for non-awarded scientists.
References
[1]
2016. Thomson Reuters database of Highly Cited Scientists. http://hcr. stateofinnovation.thomsonreuters.com/page/archives. Accessed: 2016-06--28.
[2]
2016. Wiki Trends Project. http://www.wikipediatrends.com/. Accessed: 2016- 06--28.
[3]
2016. Wikimedia Data Dumps. https://dumps.wikimedia.org/. Accessed: 2016- 06--28.
[4]
Judit Bar-Ilan, Stefanie Haustein, Isabella Peters, Jason Priem, Hadas Shema, and Jens Terliesner. 2012. Beyond citations: Scholars' visibility on the social Web. (2012). http://arxiv.org/abs/1205.5611 17th International Conference on Science and Technology Indicators, Montreal, Canada, 5--8 Sept. 2012.
[5]
Giovanni Luca Ciampaglia, Alessandro Flammini, and Filippo Menczer. 2015. The production of information in the attention economy. Scientific Reports 5 (2015), 9452.
[6]
Santo Fortunato, Carl T. Bergstrom, Katy Börner, James A. Evans, Dirk Helbing, Staša Milojević, Alexander M. Petersen, Filippo Radicchi, Roberta Sinatra, Brian Uzzi, Alessandro Vespignani, Ludo Waltman, Dashun Wang, and Albert-László Barabási. 2018. Science of science. Science 359, 6379 (March 2018), eaao0185.
[7]
Jeremy Ginsberg, MatthewH. Mohebbi, Rajan S. Patel, Lynnette Brammer, Mark S. Smolinski, and Larry Brilliant. 2009. Detecting influenza epidemics using search engine query data. Nature 457, 7232 (Feb. 2009), 1012--1014.
[8]
Nathan Oken Hodas and Kristina Lerman. 2012. HowVisibility and Divided Attention Constrain Social Contagion. In Proceedings of the 2012 ASE/IEEE International Conference on Social Computing and 2012 ASE/IEEE International Conference on Privacy, Security, Risk and Trust (SOCIALCOM-PASSAT '12). IEEE Computer Society, Washington, DC, USA, 249--257.
[9]
Thomas S. Kuhn. 2012. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: 50th Anniversary Edition. University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637.
[10]
Márton Mestyán, Taha Yasseri, and János Kertész. 2013. Early Prediction of Movie Box Office Success Based on Wikipedia Activity Big Data. PLOS ONE 8, 8 (Aug. 2013), e71226.
[11]
Orion Penner, Raj K. Pan, Alexander M. Petersen, Kimmo Kaski, and Santo Fortunato. 2013. On the Predictability of Future Impact in Science. Scientific Reports 3 (Oct. 2013), 3052.
[12]
Anna Samoilenko and Taha Yasseri. 2014. The distorted mirror of Wikipedia: a quantitative analysis of Wikipedia coverage of academics. EPJ Data Science 3, 1 (Dec. 2014), 1.
[13]
Hua-Wei Shen and Albert-László Barabási. 2014. Collective credit allocation in science. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 111, 34 (2014), 12325-- 12330.
[14]
Roberta Sinatra, DashunWang, Pierre Deville, Chaoming Song, and Albert-László Barabási. 2016. Quantifying the evolution of individual scientific impact. Science 354, 6312 (2016).
[15]
Mike Thelwall, Kayvan Kousha, Katrin Weller, and Cornelius Puschmann. 2012. Chapter 9 Assessing the Impact of Online Academic Videos. Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Chapter 9, 195--213.
[16]
Lilian Weng, Alessandro Flammini, Alessandro Vespignani, and Filippo Menczer. 2012. Competition among memes in a world with limited attention. Scientific Reports 2 (March 2012), 335.
[17]
Fang Wu and Bernardo A. Huberman. 2007. Novelty and collective attention. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 104, 45 (Nov. 2007), 17599--17601.
Index Terms
- Collective Attention towards Scientists and Research Topics
Recommendations
Why do some research articles receive more online attention and higher altmetrics? Reasons for online success according to the authors
Recent altmetrics research has started to investigate the meaning of altmetrics and whether altmetrics could reveal something about the attention or impact connected to research. This research continues this line of investigations and studies reasons ...
Do research articles with more readable abstracts receive higher online attention? Evidence from Science
AbstractThe value of scientific research is manifested in its impact in the scientific community as well as among the general public. Given the importance of abstracts in determining whether research articles (RAs) may be retrieved and read, recent ...
An altmetric investigation of the online visibility of South Korea-based scientific journals
The scientific journal is an important part of scholarly communication and for a long time it has functioned both as the sole dissemination channel of research findings and as an important indicator of research quality. Recently altmetrics have been ...
Comments
Information & Contributors
Information
Published In
May 2018
399 pages
ISBN:9781450355636
DOI:10.1145/3201064
- General Chairs:
- Hans Akkermans,
- Kathy Fontaine,
- Ivar Vermeulen,
- Program Chairs:
- Geert-Jan Houben,
- Matthew S. Weber
Copyright © 2018 Owner/Author.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs International 4.0 License.
Sponsors
Publisher
Association for Computing Machinery
New York, NY, United States
Publication History
Published: 15 May 2018
Check for updates
Author Tags
Qualifiers
- Short-paper
Funding Sources
Conference
WebSci '18
Sponsor:
Acceptance Rates
WebSci '18 Paper Acceptance Rate 30 of 113 submissions, 27%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 245 of 933 submissions, 26%
Upcoming Conference
Websci '25
- Sponsor:
- sigweb
Contributors
Other Metrics
Bibliometrics & Citations
Bibliometrics
Article Metrics
- 0Total Citations
- 466Total Downloads
- Downloads (Last 12 months)105
- Downloads (Last 6 weeks)8
Reflects downloads up to 01 Mar 2025
Other Metrics
Citations
View Options
Login options
Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.
Sign in