arXiv subjects

Ekaterina Levitskaya

Publications and source records attributed to Ekaterina Levitskaya.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Investigating individual writing style as a contributor to gender gaps in science and technology

Gender gaps in how scientific work is evaluated are well documented, but their sources remain debated. We ask whether an overlooked factor---the linguistic style of the writing itself---is gendered and consequential. Drawing on a framework that distinguishes informational features (which emphasize facts) from involved features (which emphasize relationships), we analyze single-authored abstracts of academic papers and patents across all fields of science and technology. Women's writing is systematically more involved than men's---richer in relational, audience-oriented features and higher in the balance of involved to informational language---a difference that holds across scientific fields, in collaborative as well as single-authored work, and in a large open-access biomedical corpus, throughout the full text of papers, not only their abstracts. This stylistic signature also shapes how work is received---papers whose abstracts are more involved are cited more by women and less by men, and the association persists even when papers are compared against their most content-similar alternatives, indicating a gendered signal independent of topic. That a near-costless feature of writing---word choice rather than substance---leaves a systematic, gendered trace on who cites scientific work points to a subtle channel through which evaluation bias may persist, in tension with the universalist ideal that ideas be judged independently of their author.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2024

Conceptual structure and the growth of scientific knowledge

How does scientific knowledge grow? This question has occupied a central place in the philosophy of science, stimulating heated debates, but yielding no clear consensus. Many explanations can be understood in terms of whether and how they view the expansion of knowledge as proceeding through the accretion of scientific concepts into larger conceptual structures. Here, we examine these views empirically, performing a large-scale analysis of the physical and social sciences, spanning five decades. Using natural language processing techniques, we create semantic networks of concepts, wherein noun phrases become linked when used in the same paper abstract. For both the physical and social sciences, we observe increasingly rigid conceptual cores (i.e., densely connected sets of highly central nodes) accompanied by the proliferation of periphery concepts (i.e., sparsely connected nodes that are highly connected to the core). Subsequently, we examine the relationship between conceptual structure and the growth of scientific knowledge, finding that scientific works are more innovative in fields with cores that have higher conceptual churn and with larger cores. Furthermore, scientific consensus is associated with reduced conceptual churn and fewer conceptual cores. Overall, our findings suggest that while the organization of scientific concepts is important for the growth of knowledge, the mechanisms vary across time.

cs.SI↗

arXiv2018

Impact Of Bike Sharing In New York City

The Citi Bike deployment changes the landscape of urban mobility in New York City and provides an example of a scalable solution that many other large cities are already adopting around the world. Urban stakeholders who are considering a similar deployment would largely benefit from a quantitative assessment of the impact of bike sharing on urban transportation, as well as associated economic, social and environmental implications. While the Citi Bike usage data is publicly available, the main challenge of such an assessment is to provide an adequate baseline scenario of what would have happened in the city without the Citi Bike system. Existing efforts, including the reports of Citi Bike itself, largely imply arbitrary and often unrealistic assumptions about the alternative transportation mode people would have used otherwise (e.g. by comparing bike trips against driving). The present paper offers a balanced baseline scenario based on a transportation choice model to describe projected customer behavior in the absence of the Citi Bike system. The model also acknowledges the fact that Citi Bike might be used for recreational purposes and, therefore, not all the trips would have been actually performed, if Citi Bike would not be available. The model is trained using open Citi Bike and other urban transportation data and it is applied to assess direct benefits of Citi Bike trips for the end users, as well as for urban stakeholders across different boroughs of New York City and the nearby Jersey City. Besides estimating the travel time and cost savings, the model also reports the associated gas savings, emissions cut and additional exercise for the customers, covering all three areas of anticipated impacts - economic, social and environmental.

physics.soc-ph↗

arXiv2017

Impact Of Urban Technology Deployments On Local Commercial Activity

While smart city innovations seem to be a common and necessary response to increasing challenges of urbanization, foreseeing their impact on complex urban system is critical for informed decision making. Moreover, often the effect of urban interventions goes beyond the original expectations, including multiple indirect impacts. The present study considers the impact of two urban deployments, Citi Bike (bike sharing system) and LinkNYC kiosks, on the local commercial activity in the affected neighborhoods of New York City. The study uses anonymized and aggregated insights provided through a grant from the Mastercard Center for Inclusive Growth in order to provide initial data-driven evidence towards the hypothesis that proximity of Citi Bike stations incentivizes local sales at eating places, while LinkNYC kiosks help people, especially visitors, to navigate local businesses and thus incentivize commercial activity in different business categories.

cs.CY↗