Abstract:Institutional prestige shapes access to resources, visibility, and collaboration opportunities in science. Yet whether prestige benefits researchers equally, and how it relates to differences in scientific productivity and collaboration, remains unclear. Here, we quantify prestige advantage as the relative likelihood that researchers at higher-ranked institutions have more collaborators and produce more high-impact papers compared to their lower-ranked peers. Analyzing nearly 5 million papers by 6.5 million authors across more than 65,000 institutions, we present a distributional, tail-sensitive framework to compare prestige advantage across groups. We find that the association between prestige and scientific achievement differs systematically by gender. While both men and women benefit from prestige, the returns are not gender-neutral: women experience comparable advantages only at the most elite institutions, whereas men retain persistent advantages across the broader hierarchy, with disparities widening at higher levels of achievement. Prestige advantage also grows nonlinearly, disproportionately benefiting authors at the most elite institutions. These differences align with collaboration patterns: women's networks are more locally clustered and focused on their own institution, while men collaborate more broadly across institutional strata. Together, these findings reveal a tilted playing field in science: one where prestige amplifies success unevenly and network structure shapes who can access its benefits.
From: Casandra Rusti [view email]
[v1]
Thu, 25 Jun 2026 00:06:33 UTC (254 KB)
此内容由惯性聚合(RSS阅读器)自动聚合整理，仅供阅读参考。 原文来自 — 版权归原作者所有。