Collective Attention towards Scientists and Research Topics

TL;DR

This study analyzes how online attention towards scientists and their research topics varies, especially around prestigious awards, revealing that awards influence attention towards scientists more than their research topics.

Contribution

It compares online information demand and supply for award-winning and non-awarded scientists, highlighting how awards act as external shocks affecting attention patterns.

Findings

Awards increase attention towards scientists but not their research topics.

Interest in scientists often precedes interest in their work for award winners.

Attention towards award-winning scientists is more temporally clustered.

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.