Hypothesis: university prestige shapes the flow of scientists, which determines which scientific ideas get worked on, where. In new work in @epj_ds, we show how this process can create an “epistemic advantage”, w/ @alliecmorgan D. Economou & @samfway epjdatascience.springeropen.com/articles/10.11… 1/5 
Prestige predicts who hires whose graduates as faculty (advances.sciencemag.org/content/1/1/e1…), and they carry scientific ideas with them. Via simulation, we show that ideas born at elite universities can spread exponentially further than equally good ideas from less elite places 2/5
We also tested whether hiring has influenced the spread of 5 real scientific ideas. Here's the spread of “topic modeling” (1992-2011), which we traced through the literature via expert-curated keywords, including LDA, PLSA & PLSI (#dataviz here by the fantastic @mckweller) 3/5
If you know this topic, you can spot the transition of Dave Blei (@blei_lab) from PhD (Berkeley) to Assistant Professor (Princeton) in 2006, as well as various precursor works like doi.org/10.1006/jcss.2… 4/5
Key takeaways: 1) Faculty hiring is one mechanism for the intellectual dominance of elite universities (epistemic inequality), 2) independent of "quality," ideas spread further if born at elite places, 3) we should really mitigate prestige bias in peer review (=double blind) 5/5
