Aaron Clauset

Applications are open for SFI’s 2026 summer education programs, offering research and training in complexity science in Santa Fe, NM:

– Undergraduate Complexity Research
– Complex Systems Summer School
– Graduate Workshop in Computational Social Science

Info: www.santafe.edu/engage/learn...

@cevianlabs.io CVParsa takes a stack of faculty candidate dossiers and generates a summary spreadsheet with candidate basics, current positions, publication info, research keywords, and research interests.

Send me a note and I'll send a code you can use on 5 CVs of your choice to see how it works!

After sitting on faculty hiring committees where profs & staff spend *days* of wasted time processing 100+ candidate dossiers into a 10K-foot view spreadsheet of candidates, @aaronclauset.bsky.social and I built the thing we always wanted: a computational pipeline to get the job done in 5 minutes...

Norms do vary on how much and what kind of PII are in CVs. I believe it's a bit more common in Europe to include that information than in the US. But yes, applications docs are confidential. The service protects that information in secure ways, and the data are not used in 3rd party AI training

CVParsa is the tool we wish we'd had in dozens of faculty searches we've led over the years. It's a tool that automates the tedious work of getting started on evaluating a huge pile of faculty (or postdoc) applications. If you're interested in giving it a try, let us know!
cevianlabs.io/cvparsa/

Screenshot of the cevianlabs.io website. Banner says "Accelerating Academic Hiring", followed by The Cevian Advantage, Cevian Labs provides advanced tools to faculty and administrators to make better decisions, faster. Founded by faculty who spent years wishing for a way to automate the tedious parts of faculty hiring (summarizing CVs, tracking publications, synthesizing candidate information) and finally just built the solution we always needed. Our secure platform automates manual error-prone processes to deliver...

Super excited to announce a new venture, with @danlarremore.bsky.social : Cevian Labs cevianlabs.io provides advanced tools to accelerate faculty work in academia. Our first product CVParsa helps faculty search committees process huge piles of CVs, so they can spend more time evaluating candidates

The anxious feeling of pushing code to production is so very similar to the feeling of pushing ‘submit’ for sending a manuscript to a journal 🫣 Even after 20 years as an academic

Columbia and Northwestern are the academic homes to the most prestigious journalism schools in the country and they are the two universities that caved to the Trump administration’s extortion demands that are directly connected to the First Amendment. Just gonna sit with that for a while.

In Defense of an Independent and Representative Faculty Voice: The Case of Faculty Senates BY AFSHAN JAFAR We have recently seen accelerating legislative and political attacks on faculty governing bodies at state institutions, including legislation recently enacted in Indiana, Ohio, Utah…

Faculty senates are under attack from new legislation that sidelines faculty voices and undermines academic freedom. The latest AAUP report defends independent, representative governance as essential to higher ed’s integrity. @aaup.org academeblog.org/2025/11/18/i...

Update your syllabus and stay on the frontier - it will increase your students’ wages. Epic work by my colleagues @barbarabiasi.com and @profsongma.bsky.social #linkoftheday

www.barbarabiasi.com/uploads/1/0/...

📣 Postdocs at Yale FDS! 📣 Tremendous freedom to work on data science problems with faculty across campus, multi-year, great salary. Deadline 12/15. Spread the word! Application: academicjobsonline.org/ajo/jobs/31114 More about Yale FDS: fds.yale.edu

Video for my @mit.edu IDSS Distinguished Speaker seminar "Networks untangle gender differences in productivity and prominence among scientists" on 4 Nov, with a lovely audience (see thread below for slides) #scienceofscience
www.youtube.com/watch?v=kPXl...

A staggering statistic: "North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year." What are we doing?

Screenshot of working paper: The Consequences of Faculty Sexual Misconduct

📣 New NBER Working Paper out today 📣

"The Consequences of Faculty Sexual Misconduct"
Sarah Cohodes & Katherine Leu

For folks doing academic faculty hiring — 

What kind of platform does your university require you to use? Interfolio? Avature? Something else?

Are you able to batch-download the dossier PDFs, or do you pay for someone to hand-download them all?

Ah, darn autocorrect. Tagged the wrong person. Should be @weihuali.bsky.social !

Untangling the network effects of productivity and prominence among scientists - Nature Communications While inequalities in science are common, most efforts to understand them treat scientists as isolated individuals, ignoring the network effects of collaboration. Here, the authors develop models that...

Yep! The main results are in this paper, from 2022 with @weihsiah.bsky.social and @samzhang.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Slide title: "network effects in scientific labor" networks mediate most scientific activities: 1. scientific training, hiring, collaboration, teaching, attention, peer review, etc. 2. networks act like a form of unequally distributed social capital a productive collaborator --> increases your productivity a prominent collaborator --> increases your prominence How much does who you work with impact your productivity and prominence?

Slide title: "model checking". Shows the results of applying our probabilistic generative from Li et al. Nature Communications (2022) for estimating individual productivity and prominence parameters from observed collaboration network data. This "nets out" the network, and estimates individual levels of activity. Left figure is joint distribution of productivity lambda and prominence theta, showing productivity is tightly concentrated around 0.42 papers/year, while prominence has a long tail, with most mid-career scientists (we studied 200,000 from 6 STEM fields) have very low prominence. Right figure shows pairwise correlation matrix of measures like number of papers, number of citations, lambda, theta, having a high-lambda coauthor, and having a high-theta coauthor. Strong correlation between your own number of papers and having a high-lambda (very productive) coauthor, etc. Good sanity checks for the model.

Slide title "gender vs. productivity & prominence" Notes decades of past work showing a "productivity gap" between men and women, in which men publish more papers and receive more citations over time. But, after "netting out" their collaboration networks, we find no gender difference at all between individual productivity and individual prominence, implying that it's difference in who men and women work with (the size and composition of their collaboration networks) that drives the observed gap in productivity, not differences at the individual level.

Slide title "how important is who you work with?" This is a wrap-up slide from the end of the talk: networks act like unequally distributed social capital in science they mediate our scientific attention, evaluation, and collaboration differences in collaboration networks can explain gendered differences in productivity & prominence early-career productivity & prominence what else? can we intervene in these networks to mitigate inequalities? funds for new collaborations, eg, after parenthood? early-career fellowships to work with elite senior coauthors?

Slides from my @mit.edu IDSS Distinguished Speaker seminar "Networks untangle gender differences in productivity and prominence among scientists" this week

I argue that collaboration networks act like unequally distributed (and gendered) social capital

aaronclauset.github.io/slides/Claus...

I love how Rep. Joe Neguse reframed this question.

🧵 1/
🚨 New paper out in PLOS ONE! w/ @caropradier.bsky.social @benzpierre.bsky.social @natsush.bsky.social @ipoga.bsky.social @lariviev.bsky.social
We studied 43k authors and 264k citation links in U.S. economics to ask:
👉 Why do some papers cite others?
🔗 journals.plos.org/plosone/arti...

I'm not sure. Advances is unique at AAAS in being academic editors. STM and Sci Immun are professional editors. I know all the journals are fiercely editorially independent of each other, and none of them view each other as "lower". Unfortunately, I don't have data on submissions there

People often think many papers rejected by Science end up published at Sci Adv. It’s not the case. Advances is editorially independent (run by academics), extremely picky, and more than 90% of what I handle there are direct submissions. There’s no journal “below” Advances we pass things to (cf. NPG)

@joann-trejo.bsky.social, @marymunson4.bsky.social and I have a commentary in @natcellbio.nature.com on recent attacks on DEI in biomedical research: "If scientific research, especially biomedical research, is meant to serve everyone, then it requires that everyone has an opportunity to participate"

Higher Ed’s Rush To Adopt AI Is About So Much More Than AI | Defector If you don’t work at a university or have college-age kids, you may have missed the flurry of news stories and social media banter about AI adoption in higher ed, stories which have snowballed into th...

Really well done this

defector.com/higher-eds-r...

Not being an AI-doomer, but having experienced in my own department over the past 7 years a steady erosion of faculty governance norms and diminished prioritization of research-oriented pedagogy, this tracks. Let faculty and faculty interests lead the way, rather than administrators/regents

Your Genes Are Simply Not Enough to Explain How Smart You Are Seven years ago, I took a bet with Charles Murray about whether we’d basically understand the genetics of intelligence by now.

In 2018, Charles Murray challenged me to a bet: "We will understand IQ genetically—I think most of the picture will have been filled in by 2025—there will still be blanks—but we’ll know basically what’s going on." It's now 2025, and I claim a win. I write about it in The Atlantic.

Have you seen the webweb library? It’s pretty good for a lot of network viz tasks, written in part by @danlarremore.bsky.social : webwebpage.github.io

This month, no colloquium but a special session about careers in network science! Join us and an all-star panel on October 29. Register here for a Zoom link: iu.zoom.us/webinar/regi...

Please come join our team! Looking for junior and senior faculty in science, technology, and innovation policy!!

As a scholar of academic prestige, I highly recommend asking about PhD institution. But, a fun question would be to ask: Which institution has been the most important to you in your life (or career)? (I've never asked that one before)