arXiv subjects

Xi Hong

Publications and source records attributed to Xi Hong.

5 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Advisor career stage and PhD advisee outcomes

PhD advisors are central to doctoral training, but their influence may vary across career stages. Early-, mid-, and late-career advisors may differ in research activity, mentoring capacity, professional networks and access to resources. However, little is known about how PhD advisor career stage is associated with PhD student development outcomes. Drawing on multiple large-scale datasets comprising 250,838 advisor-advisee pairs from 312 U.S. PhD-granting institutions, we examine the relationship between advisor career stage and PhD advisee outcomes in knowledge production, collaboration networks and academic career placement. We find that early-career PhD advisors are associated with advisees' higher research productivity and citation performance, more opportunities to engage in direct and intensive research collaboration, and greater likelihood of securing a faculty position. Mid- and late-career faculty, by contrast, appear to have advantages in providing network capital which students can inherit after graduation, training PhD advisees to produce disruptive research, and supporting them in securing faculty positions at top institutions. This study contributes to a more comprehensive understanding of the reproduction of scientific talent by revealing the role of advisor career stage in shaping this process. These findings have implications for doctoral applicants' decision-making and for institutional policymaking on PhD training, faculty support and faculty evaluation.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2026

Scientific exploration, collaboration and labor division in the large language model era

Large language models (LLMs) have rapidly and significantly entered scientific workflows, but it remains unclear how their diffusion is associated with changes in scientists' strategies in research directions and team building. We link PubMed Central full text with OpenAlex publication and collaboration histories for 775,323 scientists and analyze CRediT contribution statements from 137,120 multi-author papers. After 2022, scientists increasingly published across more intellectually distant fields and entered fields in which they had not previously worked. These increases in interdisciplinarity and exploration were especially pronounced among established scientists and scientists from non-English-speaking low- and middle-income countries. Authors with stronger AI-writing signals were already more interdisciplinary and exploratory before the widespread adoption of LLMs, and the gap widened further after 2022 compared with authors with weaker AI-writing signals. Scientists' collaboration networks also became more interdisciplinary after 2022. Yet, among authors with stronger AI-writing signals, research interdisciplinarity was less closely tied to the disciplinary diversity of their collaborators. The division of labor within research teams also became more differentiated. Contributors on papers published after 2022 reported narrower role sets on average, coauthors shared fewer roles in common, and their role profiles became less rigid and more fluid. Software and validation roles increased, while conceptual and management roles decreased. These patterns suggest that team members are taking on more distinct responsibilities and may rely less on one another to perform research tasks. Overall, this study indicates that the LLM era coincides with a broader reorganization of scientific exploration, collaboration, and the division of labor.

cs.DL↗

arXiv2026

BibAgent: An Agentic Framework for Traceable Miscitation Detection in Scientific Literature

Citations are the bedrock of scientific authority, yet their integrity is compromised by widespread miscitations: ranging from nuanced distortions to fabricated references. Systematic citation verification is currently unfeasible; manual review cannot scale to modern publishing volumes, while existing automated tools are restricted by abstract-only analysis or small-scale, domain-specific datasets in part due to the "paywall barrier" of full-text access. We introduce BibAgent, a scalable, end-to-end agentic framework for automated citation verification. BibAgent integrates retrieval, reasoning, and adaptive evidence aggregation, applying distinct strategies for accessible and paywalled sources. For paywalled references, it leverages a novel Evidence Committee mechanism that infers citation validity via downstream citation consensus. To support systematic evaluation, we contribute a 5-category Miscitation Taxonomy and MisciteBench, a massive cross-disciplinary benchmark comprising 6,350 miscitation samples spanning 254 fields. Our results demonstrate that BibAgent outperforms state-of-the-art Large Language Model (LLM) baselines in citation verification accuracy and interpretability, providing scalable, transparent detection of citation misalignments across the scientific literature.

cs.DL↗

arXiv2025

Parenthood Penalties in Academia: Childcare Responsibilities, Gender Role Beliefs and Institutional Support

Despite progress toward gender parity, women remain underrepresented in academia, particularly in senior research positions. This study investigates the role of parenthood in shaping gender disparities in academic careers, focusing on the complex interplay between gender, childcare responsibilities, gender role beliefs, institutional support, and scientists' career achievements. Using a large-scale survey of 5,670 U.S. and Canadian academics, supplemented with bibliometric data from Web of Science, it reveals that childcare responsibilities significantly mediate gender disparities in both subjective and objective academic achievements, with women assuming a disproportionate share of childcare duties. In particular, women shoulder a greater caregiving load when their partners are employed full-time outside academia. However, egalitarian gender role beliefs have been playing an important role in shifting this structure by transforming women academics' behaviors. As women's egalitarian gender role beliefs strengthen, their childcare responsibilities tend to diminish-an effect not mirrored in men. Institutional parental support policies show mixed effects. While flexible work schedules and childcare support can mitigate the negative association between childcare responsibilities and career outcomes of women academics, policies such as tenure clock extensions and paternity leave may inadvertently intensify it. Addressing these disparities necessitates a comprehensive approach that integrates shifts in individual attitudes, broader sociocultural changes, and policy improvements.

physics.soc-ph↗

arXiv2025

Interdisciplinary PhDs face barriers to top university placement within their disciplines

Interdisciplinary research has gained prominence as a necessity for addressing complex challenges, yet its impact on early academic careers remains unclear. This study examines how interdisciplinarity during doctoral training influences faculty placement at top universities across diverse fields. Analyzing the career trajectories of over 30,000 tenure-track faculty members who earned their Ph.D. degrees after 2005 and their initial faculty placement at 355 U.S. universities, we find that faculty newly hired by top-ranked universities tend to be less interdisciplinary in their Ph.D. research, particularly when they obtained Ph.D. from top universities and remain in their Ph.D. research field. This may reflect community trends towards homogeneity: at top universities, the existing faculty research is less interdisciplinary and more aligned with the candidates that they hire (who also exhibit lower interdisciplinarity). This preference disadvantages the placement of women graduates, who exhibit higher interdisciplinarity on average. Furthermore, we show that newly hired faculty with greater interdisciplinarity, when placed at top universities, tend to achieve higher long-term research productivity. This suggests a potential loss in knowledge production if top universities continue to undervalue interdisciplinary candidates. These findings highlight structural barriers in faculty hiring and raise concerns about the long-term consequences of prioritizing disciplinary specialization over interdisciplinary expertise.

cs.CY↗