An official website of the United States government
Citations have long been used to characterize the state of a scientific field and to identify influential works. However, writers use citations for different purposes, and this varied purpose influences uptake by future scholars. Unfortunately, our understanding of how scholars use and frame citations has been limited to small-scale manual citation analysis of individual papers. We perform the largest behavioral study of citations to date, analyzing how scientific works frame their contributions through different types of citations and how this framing affects the field as a whole. We introduce a new dataset of nearly 2,000 citations annotated for their function, and use it to develop a state-of-the-art classifier and label the papers of an entire field: Natural Language Processing. We then show how differences in framing affect scientific uptake and reveal the evolution of the publication venues and the field as a whole. We demonstrate that authors are sensitive to discourse structure and publication venue when citing, and that how a paper frames its work through citations is predictive of the citation count it will receive. Finally, we use changes in citation framing to show that the field of NLP is undergoing a significant increase in consensus.
more »
« less
This content will become publicly available on March 5, 2026
Citation penalties following sexual versus scientific misconduct allegations
Background and aimCitations in academia have long been regarded as a fundamental means of acknowledging the contribution of past work and promoting scientific advancement. The aim of this paper was to investigate the impact that misconduct allegations made against scholars have on the citations of their work, comparing allegations of sexual misconduct (unrelatedto the research merit) and allegations of scientific misconduct (directly relatedto the research merit). MethodsWe collected citation data from the Web of Science (WoS) in 2021, encompassing 31,941 publications from 172 accused and control scholars across 18 disciplines. We also conducted two studies: one on non-academics (N = 231) and one on academics (N = 240). ResultsThe WoS data shows that scholars accused of sexual misconduct incur a significant citation decrease in the three years after the accusations become public, while we do not detect a significant citation decrease for scholars accused of scientific misconduct. The study involving non-academics suggests that individuals are more averse to sexual than to scientific misconduct. Finally, contrary to the WoS data findings, a sample of academics indicates they are more likely to cite scholars accused of sexual misconduct than those accused of scientific misconduct. ConclusionsIn the first three years after accusations became public, scholars accused of sexual misconduct incur a larger citation penalty than scholars accused of scientific misconduct. However, when asked to predict their citing behavior, scholars indicated the reverse pattern, suggesting they might mis-predict their behavior or be reluctant to disclose their preferences.
more »
« less
- Award ID(s):
- 2049935
- PAR ID:
- 10656990
- Editor(s):
- Bolboacă, Sorana D
- Publisher / Repository:
- Public Library of Science
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- PLOS ONE
- Volume:
- 20
- Issue:
- 3
- ISSN:
- 1932-6203
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- e0317736
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
-
In October 2017, numerous women accused producer Harvey Weinstein of sexual harassment. Their stories encouraged other women to voice allegations of sexual harassment against many high profile men, including politicians, actors, and producers. These events are broadly referred to as the #MeToo movement, named for the use of the hashtag “#metoo” on social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook. The movement has widely been referred to as “empowering” because it has amplified the voices of previously unheard women over those of traditionally powerful men. In this work, we investigate dynamics of sentiment, power and agency in online media coverage of these events. Using a corpus of online media articles about the #MeToo movement, we present a contextual affective analysis—an entity-centric approach that uses contextualized lexicons to examine how people are portrayed in media articles. We show that while these articles are sympathetic towards women who have experienced sexual harassment, they consistently present men as most powerful, even after sexual assault allegations. While we focus on media coverage of the #MeToo movement, our method for contextual affective analysis readily generalizes to other domains.more » « less
-
Social VR's focus on embodied and immersive experiences has led to intensified and more physicalized forms of harassment than other online contexts. Therefore, a growing body of HCI and CSCW work has explored multiple strategies and mechanisms to prevent and mitigate harassment risks in social VR. However, existing works have also highlighted a fundamental challenge in mitigating harassment in social VR - the apparent lack of consensus among social VR users on how to explicitly define harassment and what behaviors should be considered harassing in social VR. In this work, we aim to offer new knowledge on the uncertainty about how harassment is defined and perceived in social VR, particularly by learning from social VR users who have experiencedboth sides of harassment accusations. Based on interviews with 12 participants with diverse identities who have both been harassed by others and been accused of harassing others in social VR, we unpack how people justify and reflect on their behavior given their prior experiences of both being victims of harassment and being called a harasser. We thus offer unique insights into the complexity of harassment in social VR by highlighting cases of gray areas and critical ethical implications in such harassment accusations, which are understudied in the existing literature. We also propose two high-level design principles for new strategies and approaches to foster safe social VR spaces based on people's unique experiences of both sides of harassment accusations in social VR.more » « less
-
Context:Many people living in the 5 inhabited US territories experience high rates of natural hazard exposure and social vulnerability to disaster impacts. Public health workforce development and evidence-based, culturally competent approaches to disaster preparedness, response, and recovery are needed in these regions. Program:In 2020, the Natural Hazards Center established thePublic Health Disaster Research Award Programwith funding from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The program’s goal is to advance public health disaster research and practice by funding, training, mentoring, and connecting researchers, students, and practitioners in historically underserved areas with high natural hazard risk. Between 2020 and 2022, 26 research teams received up to $50 000 each to investigate public health disasters in 1 or more US territories. The program also supported awardees by providing individual consultations, online trainings, feedback on report drafts, and a virtual group workshop on the public health implications of research. Awardees authored final reports and presented at a public webinar. Evaluation:In 2023, the Natural Hazards Center developed and distributed an online survey to all principal investigators. The survey evaluated how awardees advanced knowledge about public health disasters in the US territories; what skills, resources, and connections they acquired; and how they translated their research into public health applications and otherwise disseminated their findings. Discussion:Our evaluation showed that the program is advancing knowledge of understudied hazard contexts and socially vulnerable populations in the US territories and supports awardees in sharing their findings with academics, policymakers, and practitioners. Moreover, it expanded the public health disaster workforce by bringing professionals from a diverse range of disciplines and institutions into the field, and by investing in students, early career scholars, and investigators based in US territories. Researchers are working with local partners to apply their findings to practice.more » « less
-
Abstract MotivationDevelopment of bioinformatics methods is a long, complex and resource-hungry process. Hundreds of these tools were released. While some methods are highly cited and used, many suffer relatively low citation rates. We empirically analyze a large collection of recently released methods in three diverse protein function and disorder prediction areas to identify key factors that contribute to increased citations. ResultsWe show that provision of a working web server significantly boosts citation rates. On average, methods with working web servers generate three times as many citations compared to tools that are available as only source code, have no code and no server, or are no longer available. This observation holds consistently across different research areas and publication years. We also find that differences in predictive performance are unlikely to impact citation rates. Overall, our empirical results suggest that a relatively low-cost investment into the provision and long-term support of web servers would substantially increase the impact of bioinformatics tools.more » « less
