Jevin West: Echo Chambers in Science?

Digitization of the scientific literature has been trans- formative. Researchers now instantaneously access millions of papers—unquestionably a good thing for science. However, this access generally filters through search engines, library portals, and recommender systems. Here, it is less clear whether, and in what ways, these filters are benefiting scientific discovery.

• How are these technological lenses changing the practice of scientific discovery and information dissemination?
• Are these tools increasing access to a broader range of the literature and thereby democratizing science?
• Or are scientists reading a more concentrated set of papers and as a result creating a kind of filter bubble?

In this talk, I will provide a set of studies that examine the extent of citation and usage-based concentration across the digital transition and the changing role of journals in article-based search environments.
  

Jevin West

Assistant Professor in the Information School, University of Washington

Jevin West is an Assistant Professor in the Information School at the University of Washington and co-founder of the DataLab. He is an Adjunct Faculty member in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering, Data Science Fellow at the eScience Institute and Affiliate Faculty in the Center for Statistics & Social Sciences at UW. He develops knowledge discovery tools to study and facilitate science. His methods aim to detect the origins of scientific disciplines, the social and economic biases that drive these disciplines, and the impact the current publication system has on the health of science. This work led to a new course on Calling BS that he and his colleague, Carl Bergstrom, developed to combat misinformation that comes wrapped in data, figures, visualizations and statistics. The course is now being taught at universities around the globe.

Jevin West is an Assistant Professor in the Information School at the University of Washington and co-founder of the DataLab. He is an Adjunct Faculty member in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering, Data Science Fellow at the eScience Institute and Affiliate Faculty in the Center for Statistics & Social Sciences at UW. He develops knowledge discovery tools to study and facilitate science. His methods aim to detect the origins of scientific disciplines, the social and economic biases that drive these disciplines, and the impact the current publication system has on the health of science. This work led to a new course on Calling BS that he and his colleague, Carl Bergstrom, developed to combat misinformation that comes wrapped in data, figures, visualizations and statistics. The course is now being taught at universities around the globe.