James West
· Associate Professor EmeritusVerifiedUniversity of Washington · Slavic Languages & Literatures
Active 2004–2024
Research topics
- Computer Science
- Data science
- Artificial Intelligence
- Sociology
- Psychology
- Computer Security
- Social Science
- Cognitive science
- Biology
- Economic geography
- Internet privacy
- Geography
Selected publications
Science communication with generative AI
Nature Human Behaviour · 2024 · 49 citations
Senior authorCorresponding- Computer Science
- Artificial Intelligence
- Computer Science
Gender-based homophily in collaborations across a heterogeneous scholarly landscape
PLoS ONE · 2023 · 23 citations
- Sociology
- Computer Science
- Social Science
In this article, we investigate the role of gender in collaboration patterns by analyzing gender-based homophily-the tendency for researchers to co-author with individuals of the same gender. We develop and apply novel methodology to the corpus of JSTOR articles, a broad scholarly landscape, which we analyze at various levels of granularity. Most notably, for a precise analysis of gender homophily, we develop methodology which explicitly accounts for the fact that the data comprises heterogeneous intellectual communities and that not all authorships are exchangeable. In particular, we distinguish three phenomena which may affect the distribution of observed gender homophily in collaborations: a structural component that is due to demographics and non-gendered authorship norms of a scholarly community, a compositional component which is driven by varying gender representation across sub-disciplines and time, and a behavioral component which we define as the remainder of observed gender homophily after its structural and compositional components have been taken into account. Using minimal modeling assumptions, the methodology we develop allows us to test for behavioral homophily. We find that statistically significant behavioral homophily can be detected across the JSTOR corpus and show that this finding is robust to missing gender indicators in our data. In a secondary analysis, we show that the proportion of women representation in a field is positively associated with the probability of finding statistically significant behavioral homophily.
Misinformation in and about science
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · 2021 · 370 citations
1st authorCorresponding- Computer Science
- Computer Security
- Internet privacy
Humans learn about the world by collectively acquiring information, filtering it, and sharing what we know. Misinformation undermines this process. The repercussions are extensive. Without reliable and accurate sources of information, we cannot hope to halt climate change, make reasoned democratic decisions, or control a global pandemic. Most analyses of misinformation focus on popular and social media, but the scientific enterprise faces a parallel set of problems-from hype and hyperbole to publication bias and citation misdirection, predatory publishing, and filter bubbles. In this perspective, we highlight these parallels and discuss future research directions and interventions.
Frequent coauthors
- 44 shared
Carl T. Bergstrom
University of Washington
- 24 shared
Bree Norlander
- 20 shared
Juan Pablo Alperín
Simon Fraser University
- 18 shared
Vincent Larivière
- 18 shared
Jason Portenoy
- 17 shared
Kishore Vasan
- 17 shared
Stefanie Haustein
- 16 shared
Ashley Farley
Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
Education
- 2004
MS/BS, Biology
Utah State University
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