Understanding scholar-trajectories across scientific periodicals.

Despite the rapid growth in the number of scientific publications, our understanding of author publication trajectories remains limited. Here we propose an embedding-based framework for tracking author trajectories in a geometric space that leverages the information encoded in the publication sequences, namely the list of the consecutive publication venues for each scholar. Using the publication histories of approximately 30,000 social media researchers, we obtain a knowledge space that broadly captures essential information about periodicals as well as complex (inter-)disciplinary structures of science. Based on this space, we study academic success through the prism of movement across scientific periodicals. We use a measure from human mobility, the radius of gyration, to characterize individual scholars' trajectories. Results show that author mobility across periodicals negatively correlates with citations, suggesting that successful scholars tend to publish in a relatively proximal range of periodicals. Overall, our framework discovers intricate structures in large-scale sequential data and provides new ways to explore mobility and trajectory patterns.

Social identities and risk: expert and lay imaginations on pesticide use.

Expert-based environmental and health risk regulation is widely believed to suffer from a lack of public understanding and legitimacy. On controversial issues such as genetically modified organisms and food-related chemicals, a "lay-expert discrepancy" in the assessment of risks is clearly visible. In this article, we analyze the relationship between scientific experts and ordinary lay citizens in the context of risks from pesticide usage in Denmark. Drawing on concepts from the "sociology of scientific knowledge" (SSK), we contend that differences in risk perception must be understood at the level of social identities. On the basis of qualitative interviews with citizens and experts, respectively, we focus on the multiple ways in which identities come to be employed in actors' risk accounts. Empirically, we identify salient characteristics of "typical" imagined experts and lay-people, while arguing that these conceptions vary identifiably in-between four groups of citizens and experts. On the basis of our findings, some implications for bridging the lay-expert discrepancy on risk issues are sketched out.