Acclaimed for their increasing prominence, celebrities or other high-profile individuals such as politicians often enjoy this social trait.
A well-known actor can draw a large audience if they are involved in a defamation trial. This is because people enjoy seeing famous faces involved in court cases, which makes them more likely to tune into the radio or watch a movie about the story.
Prominence can also be defined as the newsworthiness of a story or event, and how often it has been covered. This applies to news stories across all genres, but is particularly prevalent in lifestyle journalism and entertainment media.
Research has suggested that social networks in science play an integral role in determining scientific productivity and prominence. These network effects may also explain why there exist persistent social and epistemic disparities within most scientific communities.
Researchers who are more productive and prominent than their colleagues typically belong to elite institutions, which provide access to resources and social capital that support early and sustained research success. Furthermore, these researchers have an increased likelihood of collaboration with other elite researchers which increases their scholarly impact. Despite these distinctions, researchers associated with elite institutions tend to have less cited publications than those at non-elite institutions.
However, these differences are largely due to network effects and are difficult to isolate without an internet connection. Furthermore, these networks tend to be highly variable and can be manipulated in various ways.
Our network models demonstrate that researchers at elite institutions are significantly more likely to be cited by their peers (Fig. 2b, e) than their counterparts in non-elite institutions. Furthermore, gendered differences in observed scholarly metrics suggest environmental prestige may not be the sole cause of these disparities.
We further examine the effect of collaboration on researcher productivity and prominence, finding that having more collaborators significantly reduces these inequalities. Researchers who collaborated with high l or high th senior coauthors during their first 5 years are significantly more likely to become highly prominent researchers by 15th career year than those who did not. Furthermore, age plays a major role here too, as older researchers tend to become more prominent than their younger peers.
Additionally, having more senior coauthors in the first five years significantly increases one’s likelihood of becoming a highly-cited researcher by around 30%. This may be attributed to senior researchers’ influence over junior colleagues. Click here to know all About Lifestyle
Research institutions and the quality of their scientists has long been overlooked, yet we now provide compelling evidence that this relationship exists. Researchers at elite institutions are three times more likely to be cited by their peers in their field and twice as likely to be highly-visible mid-career researchers compared with those at non-elite institutions. Click here to know all about Social News
