People Like Me

While browsing some papers on AEA's Review (what else would a college student do on a Saturday afternoon?), I came across a particularly relevant one following my recent post on Swiss immigration restrictions. Richard Freeman and Wei Huang's working paper No. 19905, "Collaborating With People Like Me: Ethnic co-authorship within the US" is an attempt to quantify success in research papers in correlation to name-ethnicity.

The two set out and used a program that determined the likely ethnic relationship with a full name, alongside metropolitan statistics to help estimate where people of certain backgrounds live. In case you were wondering, ethnicity was divided into 9 categories: Chinese, Anglo-Saxon/English, European, Indian/Hindi/South Asian, Hispanic/Filipino, Japanese, Korean, Russian, and Vietnamese. Controlling for particular variables (such as resources limiting one's ability to travel and meet other scholars), the study goes on to show that the percent of English names has decreased between 1985-2008, and that papers produced by individuals of the same background had lower "impact factors" and fewer citations than those with mixed ethnic authors.

From the paper itself:

Going beyond homophily, our analysis has also found that two variables that reflect diversity of authors and the knowledge they use in a paper – the number of addresses and the number of references are strongly associated with publishing in a higher impact journal and gaining more citations. A reasonable interpretation of this pattern and that for homophily is that greater diversity and breadth of knowledge of a research team contributes to the quality of the scientific papers that the team produces.

Freeman and Huang's conclusions are perhaps what we might expect in most other settings, but not necessarily academic research - which is what surprised me when first came across the paper. Two heads is better than one, right?

Although we cannot necessarily make synonymous having different ethnic backgrounds with having "diversity in perspective," I believe most people would argue that individuals with different family histories and upbringings would bring about "intellectual diversity" in some context. However, an alternative proposed in this paper could be a dominant factor in the results: those who have the financial capability to travel much more and participate in many conferences with scholars from all over the globe will be more likely to find research partners from varying backgrounds with specialized skill sets.

All things considered, Freeman and Huang's research is one more bit of evidence that has convinced me that globalization is certainly a good thing (or, grrrreat!).

As the man who inspired this blog is attributed of saying, "Where goods do not cross borders, armies will."