We study how institutions shape research, careers, and the spread of ideas.
Opportunity and collaboration
Hiring and publishing records reveal who gets opportunities and whose work gains attention. We use them to study how people and institutions contribute to knowledge.
Why it matters
Universities, research funders, and publishers make decisions about people and ideas with limited resources. Understanding how opportunities are distributed can help them examine the assumptions behind hiring, evaluation, and funding. As AI enters these decisions, we also need ways to ask whether it reproduces existing patterns or changes who can participate.
Questions we ask
- How do hiring and collaboration networks shape research careers and the circulation of ideas?
- Which contributions become visible in institutional records, and which remain difficult to measure?
- How might AI-assisted evaluation change the opportunities available to researchers?
Our approach
We connect network science, language analysis, and the study of scientific institutions. Records can reveal patterns across many people and organizations, but they are incomplete accounts of contribution. Interpreting them requires attention to the decisions that produced the data, differences between fields, and the limits of measures such as citation counts.
Support this research
Support could give students time to work with faculty on institutional data, compare methods across fields, and document analyses that other researchers can examine. A funding conversation can identify a specific question, the records needed to study it, and a realistic scope for the work.
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