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Effects of homophily and academic reputation in the nomination and selection of Nobel laureates

In collective decision-making, a group of independent experts propose individual choices to reach a common decision. This is the case of competitive events such as Olympics, international Prizes or grant evaluation, where groups of experts evaluate individual performances to assign resources, e.g. s...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Gallotti, Riccardo, De Domenico, Manlio
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Nature Publishing Group UK 2019
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6872660/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31754196
http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-53657-6
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author Gallotti, Riccardo
De Domenico, Manlio
author_facet Gallotti, Riccardo
De Domenico, Manlio
author_sort Gallotti, Riccardo
collection PubMed
description In collective decision-making, a group of independent experts propose individual choices to reach a common decision. This is the case of competitive events such as Olympics, international Prizes or grant evaluation, where groups of experts evaluate individual performances to assign resources, e.g. scores, recognitions, or funding. However, there are systems where evaluating individual’s performance is difficult: in those cases, other factors play a relevant role, leading to unexpected emergent phenomena from micro-scale interactions. The Nobel assignment procedure, rooted on recommendations, is one of these systems. Here we unveil its network, reconstructed from official data and metadata about nominators, nominees and awardees between 1901 and 1965, consisting of almost 12,000 individuals and 17,000 nominations. We quantify the role of homophily, academic reputation of nominators and their prestige neighborhood, showing that nominees endorsed by central actors – who are part of the system’s core because of their prestigious reputation – are more likely to become laureate within a finite time scale than nominees endorsed by nominators in the periphery of the network. We propose a mechanistic model which reproduces all the salient observations and allows to design possible countermeasures to mitigate observed effects.
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spelling pubmed-68726602019-12-04 Effects of homophily and academic reputation in the nomination and selection of Nobel laureates Gallotti, Riccardo De Domenico, Manlio Sci Rep Article In collective decision-making, a group of independent experts propose individual choices to reach a common decision. This is the case of competitive events such as Olympics, international Prizes or grant evaluation, where groups of experts evaluate individual performances to assign resources, e.g. scores, recognitions, or funding. However, there are systems where evaluating individual’s performance is difficult: in those cases, other factors play a relevant role, leading to unexpected emergent phenomena from micro-scale interactions. The Nobel assignment procedure, rooted on recommendations, is one of these systems. Here we unveil its network, reconstructed from official data and metadata about nominators, nominees and awardees between 1901 and 1965, consisting of almost 12,000 individuals and 17,000 nominations. We quantify the role of homophily, academic reputation of nominators and their prestige neighborhood, showing that nominees endorsed by central actors – who are part of the system’s core because of their prestigious reputation – are more likely to become laureate within a finite time scale than nominees endorsed by nominators in the periphery of the network. We propose a mechanistic model which reproduces all the salient observations and allows to design possible countermeasures to mitigate observed effects. Nature Publishing Group UK 2019-11-21 /pmc/articles/PMC6872660/ /pubmed/31754196 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-53657-6 Text en © The Author(s) 2019 Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
spellingShingle Article
Gallotti, Riccardo
De Domenico, Manlio
Effects of homophily and academic reputation in the nomination and selection of Nobel laureates
title Effects of homophily and academic reputation in the nomination and selection of Nobel laureates
title_full Effects of homophily and academic reputation in the nomination and selection of Nobel laureates
title_fullStr Effects of homophily and academic reputation in the nomination and selection of Nobel laureates
title_full_unstemmed Effects of homophily and academic reputation in the nomination and selection of Nobel laureates
title_short Effects of homophily and academic reputation in the nomination and selection of Nobel laureates
title_sort effects of homophily and academic reputation in the nomination and selection of nobel laureates
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6872660/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31754196
http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-53657-6
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