Archives des mots-clés : Teddy Lazebnik

Publishing Instincts: An Exploration-Exploitation Framework for Studying Academic Publishing Behavior and “Home Venues”

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Authors : Teddy Lazebnik, Shir Aviv-Reuven, Ariel Rosenfeld

Scholarly communication is vital to scientific advancement, enabling the exchange of ideas and knowledge. When selecting publication venues, scholars consider various factors, such as journal relevance, reputation, outreach, and editorial standards and practices. However, some of these factors are inconspicuous or inconsistent across venues and individual publications.

This study proposes that scholars’ decision-making process can be conceptualized and explored through the biologically inspired exploration-exploitation (EE) framework, which posits that scholars balance between familiar and under-explored publication venues. Building on the EE framework, we introduce a grounded definition for “Home Venues” (HVs) – an informal concept used to describe the set of venues where a scholar consistently publishes – and investigate their emergence and key characteristics.

Our analysis reveals that the publication patterns of roughly three-quarters of computer science scholars align with the expectations of the EE framework. For these scholars, HVs typically emerge and stabilize after approximately 15-20 publications. Additionally, scholars with higher h-indexes or a greater number of publications, tend to have higher-ranking journals as their HVs.

URL : https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.12158

Academic co-authorship is a risky game

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Authors : Teddy Lazebnik, Stephan Beck, Labib Shami

Conducting a project with multiple participants is a complex task that involves multiple social, economic, and psychological interactions. Conducting academic research in general and the process of writing an academic manuscript, in particular, is notorious for being challenging to successfully navigate due to the current form of collaboration dynamics common in academia.

In this study, we propose a game-theory-based model for a co-authorship writing project in which authors are allowed to raise an ultimatum, blocking the publishment of the manuscript if they do not get more credit for the work.

Using the proposed model, we explore the influence of the contribution and utility of publishing the manuscript on the rate one or more authors would gain from raising an ultimatum. Similarly, we show that the project’s duration and the current state have a major impact on this rate, as well as the number of authors.

In addition, we examine common student-advisor and colleague-colleague co-authorships scenarios. Our model reveals disturbing results and demonstrates that the current, broadly accepted, academic practices for collaborations are designed in a way that stimulates authors to raise an ultimatum and stopped only by their integrity and not by a systematic design.

URL : Academic co-authorship is a risky game

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-023-04843-x