A A S
14 Scientific American, February 2019
IN THE NEWSQuick
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By Emiliano
Rodríguez MegaFor more details, visit
http://www.ScientificAmerican.com/
feb2019/advances
DATA SCIENCE
Idea
Epidemic
An infectious disease
model shows how science
knowledge spreads
Like infectious diseases, ideas in the aca-
demic world are contagious. But why some
travel far and wide while equally good ones
remain in relative obscurity has been a mys-
tery. Now a team of computer scientists has
used an epidemiological model to simulate
how ideas move from one academic institu-
tion to another. The model showed that
ideas originating at prestigious institutions
caused bigger “epidemics” than equally
good ideas from less prominent places,
explains Allison Morgan, a computer scien-
tist at the University of Colorado Boulder
and lead author of the new study.
“This implies that where an idea is born
shapes how far it spreads, holding the
quality of the idea constant,” says senior
author Aaron Clauset, also at Boulder.
Not only is this unfair—“it reveals a big
weakness in how we’re doing science,” says
Simon DeDeo, a professor of social and
decision sciences at Carnegie Mellon Uni-
versity, who was not involved in the study.
There are many highly trained people with
good ideas who do not end up at top-tier
institutions. “They are producing good
ideas, and we know those ideas are getting
lost,” DeDeo says. “Our science, our schol-
arship, is not as good because of this.”
The Colorado researchers analyzed an
existing data set of computer science fac-
ulty hires in North America, as well as adatabase of publications by these hires.
ßäîîxā§ ̧ ̧¦xlDî ̧ÿþxUlxDä³
computer science spread to new institu-
tions. They found that hiring a new faculty
member accounted for this movement a
little more than a third of the time—and in
81 percent of those cases, transmissions
took place from higher- to lower-prestige
universities. Then the team simulated the
dissemination of ideas using an infectious
disease model and found that the size of an
idea “epidemic” (as measured by the num-
ber of institutions that published studies on
an idea after it originated) depended on
the prestige of the originating institution.
5x³l³äÿxßxÇøU§äxl ̧³§³x§Däî
October in EPJ Data Science.
The researchers’ model suggests that
there “may be a number of quite good
ideas that originate in the middle of the
pack, in terms of universities,” Clauset
says. DeDeo agrees. There is a lot of good
work coming out of less famous places, he
says: “You can learn a huge amount from
it, and you can learn things that other peo-
ple don’t know because they’re not even
paying attention.” — Viviane CallierEGYPT
An excavation near Cairo yielded dozens
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