For folks doing academic faculty hiring —  What kind of platform does your university require you to use? Interfolio? Avature? Something else? Are you able to batch-download the dossier PDFs, or do you pay for someone to hand-download them all?

Slides from my @mit.edu IDSS Distinguished Speaker seminar "Networks untangle gender differences in productivity and prominence among scientists" this week I argue that collaboration networks act like unequally distributed (and gendered) social capital aaronclauset.github.io/slides/Claus...

I love how Rep. Joe Neguse reframed this question.

🧵 1/ 🚨 New paper out in PLOS ONE! w/ @caropradier.bsky.social @benzpierre.bsky.social @natsush.bsky.social @ipoga.bsky.social @lariviev.bsky.social We studied 43k authors and 264k citation links in U.S. economics to ask: 👉 Why do some papers cite others? 🔗 journals.plos.org/plosone/arti...

@joann-trejo.bsky.social, @marymunson4.bsky.social and I have a commentary in @natcellbio.nature.com on recent attacks on DEI in biomedical research: "If scientific research, especially biomedical research, is meant to serve everyone, then it requires that everyone has an opportunity to participate"

Really well done this defector.com/higher-eds-r...

Not being an AI-doomer, but having experienced in my own department over the past 7 years a steady erosion of faculty governance norms and diminished prioritization of research-oriented pedagogy, this tracks. Let faculty and faculty interests lead the way, rather than administrators/regents

In 2018, Charles Murray challenged me to a bet: "We will understand IQ genetically—I think most of the picture will have been filled in by 2025—there will still be blanks—but we’ll know basically what’s going on." It's now 2025, and I claim a win. I write about it in The Atlantic.

This month, no colloquium but a special session about careers in network science! Join us and an all-star panel on October 29. Register here for a Zoom link: iu.zoom.us/webinar/regi...

Please come join our team! Looking for junior and senior faculty in science, technology, and innovation policy!!

This was a fun talk to give. Our new results show that "Meta-learning optimizes predictions of missing links in real-world networks" (arxiv.org/abs/2508.09069). tl;dr: graph neural networks are a limited tool for predicting missing links in most networks www.youtube.com/watch?v=dRYz...

Why does a gender gap in scientific “productivity” persist? 📅 Oct 8, @aaronclauset.bsky.social in Umeå: biased networks, not ability, explain the difference. Join us! 🔗 www.umu.se/en/events/ic... @umeauniversitet.bsky.social

My fellow academics: the @aaup.org is doing amazing work, successfully! defending faculty and universities against attacks from Vought/the Trump administration. Proud to be a member. It takes only 3 minutes to join, to support them fighting the good fight for all Americans ✊ www.aaup.org

Trump's higher ed ransom note is here - everyone would have to acquiesce to their unprecedented demands or not be "given priority for grants," plus they can demand "reimbursement" for "violations" www.wsj.com/us-news/educ... A mechanism to enforce fealty. An attack on academic freedom and democracy

📌 Save the Date! The flagship conference of the Network Science Society - 𝗡𝗲𝘁𝗦𝗰𝗶 𝟮𝟬𝟮𝟲 - is coming to Northeastern University’s Network Science Institute, 𝗝𝘂𝗻𝗲 𝟭-𝟱, 𝟮𝟬𝟮𝟲. Prepare to share ideas, discoveries & challenges in network science. Registration opens soon! 🔗 www.netsci2026.com

It took me 2 minutes to write about how this proposed rule would eliminate all foreign PhD students, who are a critical part of US science and technology, and drive US innovation and economic growth

Presented at PRC10: Mss characteristics associated w being sent for review, final acceptance @science.org #ScienceAdvances 2015-19 include institutional prestige, country, team size www.science.org/cont...#ScienceAdvances@jeffreybrainard.bsky.social @aaronclauset.bsky.social @sfiscience.bsky.social @aaas.org

I submitted my comment and I hope you all will join me. www.federalregister.gov/documents/20...

Folks who've used name-based gender labelers in comp. social science work, I understand that 'nomquamgender' (via this paper) ojs.aaai.org/index.php/IC... squeezes the maximal signal out of name databases. Has there been any evaluation of LLM accuracies for this task? Pointers welcome!

OLIVER: "While I do get the appeal of thinking just 'one more concession, one more payoff' might safeguard your independence or let you live to fight another day, it's worth asking: At what point have you compromised so much that the thing you're supposed to be defending is gone?"

@aaronclauset.bsky.social’s work on how institution influences academic outcomes always reminds me what a catch22 department can be—at a top place, you’re doomed to wonder how much of the success you deserved; if you’re not, you‘re left wondering if your work has been overlooked. Prestige games suck

Next: Aaron Clauset with 'Manuscript Characteristics Associated With Editorial Review and Peer Review Outcomes at Science and Science Advances' Elite journals have profound influence in science discourse/careers - a lot of submissions get desk-rejected. #PRC10

New paper in PLOS Biology: as we raise the difficulty of our 3D printed puzzles, bees keep landing on combs with ever stranger hexagonal order! 🐝 Led by the brilliant Golnar Gharooni Fard, in collaboration with CK Prasanna & FL Jiménez journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...

New job ad: Assistant Professor of Quantitative Social Science, Dartmouth College apply.interfolio.com/172357 Please share with your networks. I am the search chair and happy to answer questions!

This analysis of how ideas spread in the early scientific revolution, from person to person and place to place, lines up so nicely with @alliemorgan.bsky.social's 2018 paper on the diffusion of scientific ideas via modern faculty hiring networks epjdatascience.springeropen.com/articles/10....

Next was a fantastic talk by @aaronclauset.bsky.social on the unequal impact of parenthood in academia at @iasliu.bsky.social. Highly recommend www.youtube.com/watch?v=jK_d... (10/13)

I'm very excited to be sabbatical this next academic year. Today, I got my inbox down to the lowest level it has ever been since I started as faculty 16 years ago. That's a positive sign for sabbatical productivity... right? 🫠 p.s. Don't ask me about my book (yet)

Are you a student in mathematics or an adjacent field? Help us understand how funding access and eligibility have affected your career. Take a short survey here tinyurl.com/MathFundingA...

1. Federal funding for research promotes tech, biomedical, and scientific discovery in the US, and provides training for the sci/tech workforce that has brought immeasurable wealth to the US over the past 75 years. Today's executive order includes a provision that will obliterate both functions.

This is unfortunate: www.nytimes.com/2025/07/28/u... I wrote to the president of Harvard. I hope other faculty will speak their conscience, even if it means more struggle ahead.

Applications are open for SFI's 2026 Complexity Postdoctoral Fellowships If you’ve recently earned a Ph.D. in any scientific field and want to pursue independent, transdisciplinary research, consider applying. Deadline: October 1, 2025 Apply here: santafe.edu/sfifellowship

Out of curiosity, aimed at other faculty: Does your university allow you to apply for Google or Amazon research awards, or are the legal terms from the funders found to be too onerous by university grants/legal/trademark?

Our team had an amazing week at @ic2s2.bsky.social in Norrköping Sweden and we will post pictures of our posters and talks soon - the big news is that we're so excited to host #IC2S2 in Burlington in 2026! youtu.be/p412S4GnPkc

In my latest blog post I lay out some things we as faculty can do to ensure that higher education remains an incubator that prepares future generations for a multiracial democracy as opposed to an incubator for Trump's fascist agenda. Check it out! educationallinguist.wordpress.com/2025/07/24/a...

That Dominique Baker can be a real downer sometimes (the entire piece is very good and a useful overview if you want to get caught up)

I've had this headline rattling around in my brain since January and I finally wrote it. Been hearing too many people in the startup world buying into the neoractionary nonsense that maybe a little light fascism is good for silicon valley. It's not. It's very, very bad.

Folks who follow LLM stuff: has anyone used LLMs to "evolve" or otherwise optimize prompts for another LLM task? Like, using an LLM to search the space of prompts for ones that make another LLM score well on some specific task.

"My inescapable conclusion has become that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people." Written by an Ivy League professor who studies the Holocaust; who served in the IDF. www.nytimes.com/2025/07/15/o...

Here Vox's explainer for just what is going on at the Department of Education which includes me saying I don't have faith in financial aid disbursement next year and, oh yea, I think we're in a constitutional crisis www.vox.com/policy/40233...

So what can we do in response? A key problem: The transformation from long- to short-term funding leads researchers to flit from topic to topic, and move across fields chasing 'sexy' stories. Science is done better when you leave someone to geek out on a single topic for their whole career. 5/n

CONCLUSIONS: To promote the best science being done, we need to look at the incentives of science publishing and funding. Long-term funding produces better science. Short-term and topical agendas encourages irreproducibility. Funding model organisms generates science we can build on! 🪰🪱🦠🐠🐁🐸 6/6 🧵

What makes a country great in the 21st century is science, and it’s really insane to purposefully destroy its science enterprise.

Marcia McNutt (president of @nasonline.org) should resign. NAS needs a leader who understands what it means to forcefully defend science's unique role in seeking and speaking truth.

I don’t think anyone is prepared for what they just did w/ ICE. This is not a simple budget increase. It is an explosion - making ICE bigger than the FBI, US Bureau of Prisons, DEA,& others combined. It is setting up to make what’s happening now look like child’s play. And people are disappearing.

The evil that men do lives after them

📣 We're on the lookout for a creative postdoc with strong computational skills! Be the go-to person in the lab for building simple but powerful simulations that test wild ideas on biological rythems: from daily cycles of mussel groups at deep sea, to firefly flash synchronization! More info below👇

STAGGERING: This new study of 133 countries is the first to estimate the impact of all USAID’s work. In 2 decades, it has saved *92M* lives. Current cuts, if not reversed, are forecast to cost up to *14M* lives thru 2030. www.thelancet.com/journals/lan...

"There is still time to make your voices heard. The reason they are moving so quickly is because the more the public learns about the bill, they more they oppose it. The hour is late, but not too late."

Slides from my keynote lecture "What drives the productivity of scientific labor?" at the 2025 Oxford Summer School on Economic #Networks. Part 1 of 2: why and how do elite scientists dominate scientific discourse? aaronclauset.github.io/slides/Claus...