A classic topic in the study of innovation is the link between physical proximity and the exchange of ideas. But I’ve long been interested in a relatively new kind of serendipity engine, which isn’t constrained by physical proximity: Twitter. Lots of academics use twitter to talk about new discoveries and research. Today I want to look at whether twitter serves as a novel kind of knowledge diffusion platform.

This podcast is an audio read through of the (initial version of the) article Twitter and the Spread of Academic Knowledge, originally published on New Things Under the Sun.

Articles mentioned
de Winter, J.C.F. 2015. The relationship between tweets, citations, and article views for PLOS ONE articles. Scientometrics 102: 1773-1779. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-014-1445-x

Jeong, J.W., M.J. Kim, H.-K. Oh, S. Jeong, M.H. Kim, J.R. Cho, D.-W. Kim and S.-B Kang. 2019. The impact of social media on citation rates in coloproctology. Colorectal Disease (10):1175-1182. https://doi.org/10.1111/codi.14719

Peoples, Brandon K., Stephen R. Midway, Dana Sackett, Abigail Lynch, and Patrick B. Cooney. 2016. Twitter predicts citation rates of ecological research. PLoS ONE 11(11): e0166570. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0166570

Lamb, Clayton T., Sophie L. Gilbert, and Adam T. Ford. 2018. Tweet success? Scientific communication correlates with increased citations in Ecology and Conservation. PeerJ 6:e4564. https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.4564

Chan, Ho Fai, Ali Sina Önder, Sascha Schweitzer, and Benno Torgler. 2023. Twitter and citations. Economics Letters 231: 111270. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.econlet.2023.111270

Finch, Tom, Nina O’Hanlon, and Steve P. Dudley. 2017. Tweeting birds: online mentions predict future citations in ornithology. Royal Society Open Science 4171371. http://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.171371

Tonia, Thomy, Herman Van Oyen, Anke Berger, Christian Schindler, and Nino Künzli. 2020. If I tweet will you cite later? Follow-up on the effect of social media exposure on article downloads and citations. International Journal of Public Health 65: 1797–1802. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00038-020-01519-8

Branch, Trevor A., Isabelle M. Cȏté, Solomon R. David, Joshua A. Drew, Michelle LaRue, Melissa C. Márquez, E. C. M. Parsons, D. Rabaiotti, David Shiffman, David A. Steen, Alexander L. Wild. 2024. Controlled experiment finds no detectable citation bump from Twitter promotion. PLoS ONE 19(3): e0292201. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0292201

Qiu, Jingyi, Yan Chen, Alain Cohn, and Alvin E. Roth. 2024. Social Media and Job Market Success: A Field Experiment on Twitter. SSRN Working Paper. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4778120

Note:

Economists typically think that labor and capital are complementary - more of the one makes the other more productive. But there’s a flourishing literature that looks at the consequences of capital that replaces, rather than augments, human workers. In this post, I want to talk about a very simple equation that is inspired by the ideas in these papers, and which I think is a useful thinking tool.

This podcast is an audio read through of the (initial version of the) article When the Robots Take Your Job, originally published on New Things Under the Sun.

Articles Mentioned:
Acemoglu, Daron, and Pascual Restrepo. 2018. The Race between Man and Machine: Implications of Technology for Growth, Factor Shares, and Employment. American Economic Review 108(6): 1488-1542. https://doi.org/10.1257/aer.20160696

Acemoglu, Daron, and Pascual Restrepo. 2022. Tasks, Automation, and the Rise in U.S. Wage Inequality. Econometrica 90(5): 1973-2016. https://doi.org/10.3982/ECTA19815

Korinek, Anton, and Donghyun Suh. 2024. Scenarios for the Transition to AGI. NBER Working Paper 32255. https://doi.org/10.3386/w32255

Welcome to patents week! I set out to write a post about using patents to measure innovation, but it turned into four. I'm releasing podcasts of each episode, one per day, but if you're too excited to wait, you can read all four here, on New Things Under the Sun.

1. How many inventions are patented? Less than half, more than zero
2. Patents (weakly) predict innovation: Correlations between patents and other proxies for innovation
3. Do studies based on patents get different results? For the sample on New Things Under the Sun, not really
4. Can we learn about innovation from patent data? The definitive New Things Under the Sun Post

This podcast covers #4: Can We Learn About Innovation From Patent Data?