
NSF Org: |
SMA SBE Office of Multidisciplinary Activities |
Recipient: |
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Initial Amendment Date: | June 13, 2017 |
Latest Amendment Date: | August 28, 2018 |
Award Number: | 1735194 |
Award Instrument: | Continuing Grant |
Program Manager: |
Joshua Trapani
SMA SBE Office of Multidisciplinary Activities SBE Directorate for Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences |
Start Date: | August 1, 2017 |
End Date: | July 31, 2020 (Estimated) |
Total Intended Award Amount: | $234,128.00 |
Total Awarded Amount to Date: | $293,372.00 |
Funds Obligated to Date: |
FY 2018 = $90,148.00 |
History of Investigator: |
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Recipient Sponsored Research Office: |
4333 BROOKLYN AVE NE SEATTLE WA US 98195-1016 (206)543-4043 |
Sponsor Congressional District: |
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Primary Place of Performance: |
Seattle WA US 98195-4320 |
Primary Place of
Performance Congressional District: |
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Unique Entity Identifier (UEI): |
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Parent UEI: |
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NSF Program(s): |
Cross-Directorate Activities, SciSIP-Sci of Sci Innov Policy |
Primary Program Source: |
01001718DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT 01001819DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT |
Program Reference Code(s): |
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Program Element Code(s): |
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Award Agency Code: | 4900 |
Fund Agency Code: | 4900 |
Assistance Listing Number(s): | 47.075 |
ABSTRACT
Digitization of the scientific literauture has occurred in two phases: first, scientific papers began to be digitized, and second, comprehensive search engines such as Google Scholar, JSTOR and Web of Science emerged that allow scholars to quickly search for and locate published research. Most scientists now access the literature through online search engines and digital libraries, and rare is the scientist who walks to the library and peruses the journal shelves for new papers. These new algorithmic search engines thus provide scholars with a new lens into the published scientific literature, and this project aims to better understand the implications of these technological changes on the practice of scientific discovery and information dissemination. The project investigates whether these new tools are increasing access to a wider range of prior literature and thereby democratizing science, or instead concentrating scholars' gaze onto an ever smaller set of "star" papers. If the new tools are truly making the widest range of scientific literature more accessible, it certainly has implications for the prospects for scientific discovery, since scientists are able to consider and engage with all relevant prior work, a critical ingredient for high quality scientific activity. On the other hand, evidence from other contexts suggests that the availability of massive amounts of information puts new pressure on searching and filtering processes. If this occurs in science it could mean that scientists increasingly rely upon more concentrated subset of papers that appear at the top of search results, thereby creating an echo chamber in science with unintended effects on scientific careers and potentially negative downstream impacts on scientific innovation.
This research addresses these critical questions primarily via statistical analyses of comprehensive citation data from JSTOR and the Web of Science. The research focuses on the extent of citation concentration within and across disciplines; and the role of journals in an article-based search environment. Citation patterns have changed dramatically in the wake of the digital transition, becoming both more concentrated and more vulnerable to cumulative advantage processes. The population-level analyses are augmented by observational data describing how scientists actually interact with information technologies and academic recommender systems in the course of their scientific practice. This combination of methods links processes at the individual and population levels over time, and emphasizes the downstream impacts of information retrieval and citation on scientific innovation and career trajectories. A critical policy related implication is that online recommender systems can bias search results and thus the visibility of specific scientific findings. This is relevant to the next generation of scientists using these search environments and those who evaluate scientists and their work.
PUBLICATIONS PRODUCED AS A RESULT OF THIS RESEARCH
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PROJECT OUTCOMES REPORT
Disclaimer
This Project Outcomes Report for the General Public is displayed verbatim as submitted by the Principal Investigator (PI) for this award. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this Report are those of the PI and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation; NSF has not approved or endorsed its content.
The core question motivating our research is, what impact are new web-based academic recommender systems having on how scientists engage with prior scientific research? Our aim was to assess the extent to which these tools have enhanced scholars' access to (and citation of) a wide range of potentially relevant prior work thereby democratizing science, or if they are concentrating scholars’ gaze onto an ever smaller set of ”star” papers. If the new tools are making scientific literature more accessible, it will have implications for the prospects for scientific discovery, since it will signal that scientists are drawing on all relevant prior work, a critical ingredient for high quality scientific activity. On the other hand, evidence from other contexts suggests that the availability of massive amounts of information puts new pressure on searching and filtering processes. This could mean that scientists are increasingly reading and citing a more concentrated subset of papers (i.e. those that appear at the top of search results), and are therefore at risk of being trapped in an unproductive scientific echo chamber. Answering these questions requires the development of new methods and data sources, including new methods for comparing inequalities over time or across contexts. Using these methods, we find minimal change in citation concentration even as new search technologies become dominant.
Additional work addresses the continued significance of scientific journals. Journals play a critical role in the scientific process because they evaluate the quality of incoming papers and offer an organizing filter for search. However, the role of journals has been called into question because new preprint archives and academic search engines make it easier to find articles independent of the journals that publish them. Research on this issue is complicated by the deeply confounded relationship between article quality and journal reputation. We present an innovative proxy for individual article quality that is divorced from the journal's reputation or impact factor: the number of citations to preprints posted on arXiv.org. Using this measure to study three subfields of physics that were early adopters of arXiv, we show that prior estimates of the effect of journal reputation on an individual article's impact (measured by citations) are likely inflated. While we find that higher-quality preprints in these subfields are now less likely to be published in journals compared to prior years, we find little systematic evidence that the role of journal reputation on article performance has declined.
Last Modified: 01/29/2021
Modified by: Jevin West
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