Science and Ethnicity: How Ethnicities Shape the Evolution of Computer Science Research Community

Abstract: Globalization and the world wide web has resulted in academia and science being an international and multicultural community forged by researchers and scientists with different ethnicities. How ethnicity shapes the evolution of membership, status and interactions of the scientific community, however, is not well understood. This is due to the difficulty of ethnicity identification at the large scale. We use name ethnicity classification as an indicator of ethnicity. Based on automatic name ethnicity classification of 1.7+ million authors gathered from Web, the name ethnicity of computer science scholars is investigated by population size, publication contribution and collaboration strength. By showing the evolution of name ethnicity from 1936 to 2010, we discover that ethnicity diversity has increased significantly over time and that different research communities in certain publication venues have different ethnicity compositions. We notice a clear rise in the number of Asian name ethnicities in papers. Their fraction of publication contribution increases from approximately 10% to near 50% from 1970 to 2010. We also find that name ethnicity acts as a homophily factor on coauthor networks, shaping the formation of coauthorship as well as evolution of research communities.