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Cumulative Advantage and Inequality in Science
Abstract
The hypothesis of cumulative advantage is widely accepted in the sociology of science, but empirical tests have been few and equivocal. One approach, originated by Allison and Stewart (1974), is to see whether inequality of productivity and recognition increases as a cohort of scientists ages. This paper extends their work by examining true cohorts of biochemists and chemists rather than synthetic cohorts. Increasing inequality is observed for counts of publications but not for counts of citations to all previous publications. It is also shown that a mathematical model of cumulative advantage does not imply increasing inequality. When the model is modified to allow for heterogeneity in the rate of cumulative advantage, however, increasing inequality is implied.
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Citations
Cited by
DiPrete, T. A., & Eirich, G. M. (2006) · Annual Review of Sociology · doi:10.1146/annurev.soc.32.061604.123127 · Cited by 2,069
Education, Age, and the Cumulative Advantage in Health
Ross, C. E., & Wu, C.-L. (1996) · Journal of Health and Social Behavior · doi:10.2307/2137234 · Cited by 828
The Structure of a Social Science Collaboration Network: Disciplinary Cohesion from 1963 to 1999
Moody, J. (2004) · American Sociological Review · doi:10.1177/000312240406900204 · Cited by 738
The Matthew effect in science funding
Bol, T., de Vaan, M., & van de Rijt, A. (2018) · Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · doi:10.1073/pnas.1719557115 · Cited by 638
Departmental Effects on Scientific Productivity
Allison, P. D., & Long, J. S. (1990) · American Sociological Review · doi:10.2307/2095801 · Cited by 440
Self-citation
Metadata
- Authors
- Allison, P. D., Long, J. S., & Krauze, T. K.
- Venue
- American Sociological Review
- Publisher
- SAGE Publications
- Published
- 1982-10
- Volume
- 47
- Issue
- 5
- Pages
- 615
- ISSN
- 0003-1224 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W2086517394
- Cited by
- 365
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 5.00
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
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- Allison, P. D., Long, J. S., & Krauze, T. K. (1982). Cumulative Advantage and Inequality in Science. American Sociological Review. https://doi.org/10.2307/2095162
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Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
