The Matthew effect in empirical data
arXiv:1408.5124 · doi:10.1098/rsif.2014.0378
Abstract
The Matthew effect describes the phenomenon that in societies the rich tend to get richer and the potent even more powerful. It is closely related to the concept of preferential attachment in network science, where the more connected nodes are destined to acquire many more links in the future than the auxiliary nodes. Cumulative advantage and success-breads-success also both describe the fact that advantage tends to beget further advantage. The concept is behind the many power laws and scaling behaviour in empirical data, and it is at the heart of self-organization across social and natural sciences. Here we review the methodology for measuring preferential attachment in empirical data, as well as the observations of the Matthew effect in patterns of scientific collaboration, socio-technical and biological networks, the propagation of citations, the emergence of scientific progress and impact, career longevity, the evolution of common English words and phrases, as well as in education and brain development. We also discuss whether the Matthew effect is due to chance or optimisation, for example related to homophily in social systems or efficacy in technological systems, and we outline possible directions for future research.
15 two-column pages, 7 figures; accepted for publication in Journal of the Royal Society Interface
References in corpus (25)
- Power-law distributions in empirical data
- Synchronization in complex networks
- Critical phenomena in complex networks
- Evolutionary dynamics of group interactions on structured populations: A review
- Universality of citation distributions: towards an objective measure of scientific impact
- Laws of Population Growth
- Sharp transition towards shared vocabularies in multi-agent systems
- Diffusion of scientific credits and the ranking of scientists
- Preferential attachment in the growth of social networks: the case of Wikipedia
- World citation and collaboration networks: uncovering the role of geography in science
- The Twitter of Babel: Mapping World Languages through Microblogging Platforms
- Preferential attachment in the protein network evolution
- Cultural route to the emergence of linguistic categories
- Complex cooperative networks from evolutionary preferential attachment
- Non-equilibrium dynamics of language games on complex networks
- Topology and Evolution of Technology Innovation Networks
- Evolution of the most common English words and phrases over the centuries
- A reverse engineering approach to the suppression of citation biases reveals universal properties of citation distributions
- Growth and structure of Slovenia's scientific collaboration network
- Stochastic dynamical model of a growing network based on self-exciting point process
- The Biological Origin of Linguistic Diversity
- Characterizing scientific production and consumption in Physics
- In science "there is no bad publicity": Papers criticized in comments have high scientific impact
- The case for caution in predicting scientists' future impact
- The transition towards immortality: non-linear autocatalytic growth of citations to scientific papers