Seminar: Quantifying the biases of scientific success

  • Datum: 18.05.2021
  • Uhrzeit: 15:30
  • Vortragende(r): Roberta Sinatra
  • Ort: online
  • Gastgeber: Forschungsbereich Mensch und Maschine

Roberta Sinatra, IT University of Copenhagen

Quantifying the biases of scientific success

Performance, also referred to as quality of fitness, represents the objective achievements of an individual, like the winning record of an athlete or the body of work of a scientist. In contrast, success, also referred to as impact, popularity, or visibility, is a collective phenomenon, indicating a community’s reaction to an individual’s performance. Why is the difference between performance and success important? Because in many areas of human activity, we often rely on success to measure performance - especially in science, where citations and visibility are constantly used to gauge quality, to assign recognition, and to allocate resources. Yet, success is strongly susceptible to effects that have NOTHING to do with performance, like gender or reputation. In this talk, quantitatively success and impact in science are studied. Based on the premise that success is a collective phenomenon, the tools of network science, data science, and computational social science are used to provide quantitative answers to these questions.

Roberta Sinatra is Associate Professor at IT University of Copenhagen, and holds visiting positions at ISI (Italy) and Complexity Science Hub (Austria). Her research is at the forefront of network science, data science, and computational social science. Roberta completed her studies in Physics at the University of Catania, Italy, and was first a postdoctoral fellow, then a research faculty at Northeastern University (Boston, USA). Her research has been published in general audience journals such as Nature and Science, and has been featured in The New York Times and The Economist, among other major media outlets. Her research has been awarded the Complex Systems Society Junior prize, the DPG Young Scientist Award for Socio- and Econophysics, and a Villum Young Investigator grant.

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