A utility model of authors in the scientific community

Abstract

Authoring a scientific paper is a complex process involving many decisions. We introduce a probabilistic model of some of the important aspects of that process: that authors have individual preferences, that writing a paper requires trading off among the preferences of authors as well as extrinsic rewards in the form of community response to their papers, that preferences (of individuals and the community) and tradeoffs vary over time. Variants of our model lead to improved predictive accuracy of citations given texts and texts given authors. Further, our model's posterior suggests an interesting relationship between seniority and author choices.