How to become famous? Motives in scientific social networks

Abstract

Scientometry is the discipline for measuring the success and influence of scientific work. This is usually done by analyzing scientific networks, most notably, citation networks and co-authorship networks. In our work we are taking another approach: we observe the evolution of individual scientific careers through the lens of social scientific recognition measured by the membership in program committees of conferences and editorial boards of scientific journals. Then we compare the data on program committee membership and editorial board membership with the history of scientific publications to find frequent sequences of events that lead to one's invitation to a prestigious conference or journal. We call these sequences motives and we define a few distinct classes of such motives. The large body of data harvested from the Web allows us to experimentally verify the validity and benefit of the proposed approach. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2013.