Ian Van Buskirk | Searcharxiv

arXiv2026

Consensus and fragmentation in academic publication preferences

Academic publishing requires solving a collective coordination problem: among thousands of possible publication venues, which deserve a community's attention? A clear consensus helps scholars allocate attention, match submissions to appropriate outlets, and evaluate scholars for hiring and promotion. Yet preferences are not centrally coordinated--they emerge within each field over time. Here we ask whether all fields have arrived at similar solutions to this coordination problem, and whether preferences vary systematically with individual characteristics. Using an adaptive survey of 3,510 US tenure-track faculty yielding 163,002 pairwise comparisons across 8,044 venues, we show that fields occupy a wide spectrum of coordination. Economics, Chemistry, and Physics exhibit strong consensus, with respondents agreeing on elite venues and accurately predicting one another's choices. Computer Science and Engineering show fragmented preferences distributed across hundreds of outlets with minimal overlap. Within fields, preferences correlate with institutional prestige--faculty at elite institutions prefer higher-ranked venues--and with gender, as men prefer higher-ranked venues than women even after accounting for prestige and career stage. Scholars realize their personal preferences more successfully than their respective fields' consensus preferences, indicating that heterogeneity, not just selective hierarchy, shapes publishing outcomes. Journal Impact Factors explain only 64% of preference choices, systematically undervaluing what fields actually prefer. These results quantify how publication preferences vary across the structural diversity of academic fields.

cs.DL↗

arXiv2022

An Open-Source Cultural Consensus Approach to Name-Based Gender Classification

Name-based gender classification has enabled hundreds of otherwise infeasible scientific studies of gender. Yet, the lack of standardization, proliferation of ad hoc methods, reliance on paid services, understudied limitations, and conceptual debates cast a shadow over many applications. To address these problems we develop and evaluate an ensemble-based open-source method built on publicly available data of empirical name-gender associations. Our method integrates 36 distinct sources-spanning over 150 countries and more than a century-via a meta-learning algorithm inspired by Cultural Consensus Theory (CCT). We also construct a taxonomy with which names themselves can be classified. We find that our method's performance is competitive with paid services and that our method, and others, approach the upper limits of performance; we show that conditioning estimates on additional metadata (e.g. cultural context), further combining methods, or collecting additional name-gender association data is unlikely to meaningfully improve performance. This work definitively shows that name-based gender classification can be a reliable part of scientific research and provides a pair of tools, a classification method and a taxonomy of names, that realize this potential.

cs.SI↗