The spread of ideas in the scientific community is often viewed as a competition, in which good ideas spread further because of greater intrinsic fitness, and publication venue and citation counts correlate with importance and impact. However, relatively little is known about how structural factors influence the spread of ideas, and specifically how where an idea originates might influence how it spreads. Here, we investigate the role of faculty hiring networks, which embody the set of researcher transitions from doctoral to faculty institutions, in shaping the spread of ideas in computer science, and the importance of where in the network an idea originates. We consider comprehensive data on the hiring events of 5032 faculty at all 205 Ph.D.-granting departments of computer science in the U.S. and Canada, and on the timing and titles of 200,476 associated publications. Analyzing five popular research topics, we show empirically that faculty hiring can and does facilitate the spread of ideas in science. Having established such a mechanism, we then analyze its potential consequences using epidemic models to simulate the generic spread of research ideas and quantify the impact of where an idea originates on its longterm diffusion across the network. We find that research from prestigious institutions spreads more quickly and completely than work of similar quality originating from less prestigious institutions. Our analyses establish the theoretical trade-offs between university prestige and the quality of ideas necessary for efficient circulation. Our results establish faculty hiring as an underlying mechanism that drives the persistent epistemic advantage observed for elite institutions, and provide a theoretical lower bound for the impact of structural inequality in shaping the spread of ideas in science.

中文翻译：

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威望在科学思想的传播中推动认识论的不平等

在科学界中，思想的传播通常被视为竞争，由于内在适应性的提高，好的思想会进一步传播，出版场所和引用次数与重要性和影响力相关。但是，关于结构性因素如何影响思想的传播，尤其是关于思想起源的方式可能影响思想传播的方式，知之甚少。在这里，我们研究了教师招聘网络的作用，该网络体现了从博士到教师机构的一系列研究人员过渡，在塑造计算机科学中思想的传播以及思想起源于网络中的重要性。我们考虑了有关美国和加拿大所有205个授予博士学位的计算机科学系的5032名教职员工的招聘事件以及200个课程的时间和职称的综合数据 476个相关出版物。通过分析五个流行的研究主题，我们从经验上表明，教师的聘用可以而且确实可以促进科学思想的传播。建立了这样的机制后，我们将使用流行病模型分析其潜在后果，以模拟研究思路的普遍传播，并量化思路起源于其对整个网络的长期传播的影响。我们发现，来自知名机构的研究比源自不太知名机构的类似质量的研究更快，更全面地传播。我们的分析建立了大学声望与有效流通所必需的思想质量之间的理论取舍。