Description:

Title: The Science of Sharing and the Sharing of Science: Diffusion of Scientific Articles across Online Platforms

Abstract

Online platforms such as social media sites, electronic news outlets, blogs, and wikis are now used by most scholars for sharing their findings. They have also become the primary source of information about scientific advances for the wider public. As the online dissemination of scientific findings increasingly influences personal decision-making and government action, there is a growing necessity and interest in studying how people share research findings online. In this talk, I report results on analyses of the diffusion of scientific articles across major online platforms based on 63 million mentions of about 7.2 million articles over a 7-year period. First, I show commonalities between people sharing science and other content such as news articles and memes. Second, I explore specifics of sharing science. We reconstruct the likely underlying structure of information diffusion and investigate the transfer of information about scientific articles within and across different platforms. In particular, we (1) study the role of different users in the dissemination of information to better understand who are the prime sharers of knowledge, (2) explore the propagation of articles between platforms, and (3) analyze the structural virality of individual information cascades to place science sharing on the spectrum between pure broadcasting and actual peer-to-peer diffusion. This work provides the broadest study to date about the sharing of science online and builds the basis for an informed model of the dynamics of research coverage across platforms.

Bio

Ágnes Horvát (PhD, Heidelberg University) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication Studies, an affiliated faculty of the Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO), the Northwestern University Transportation Center (NUTC), and the Department of Management and Organizations of the Kellogg School of Management (by courtesy). Her current research develops data science approaches to promote cultural innovation processes that integrate individual creativity, collaboration networks, crowdsourcing and machine learning tools. With training in Physics (BSc, MSc, and PhD) and Film and Media (BA), her work uses a multidisciplinary empirical approach to measure and understand success dynamics in cultural and knowledge markets, as well as to identify expressions of the wisdom of crowds that facilitate innovation and ensure better decision-making. Her research group's work is funded by the National Science Foundation through a CRII award. Before starting her appointment in the School of Communication, Horvát was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO).