E Leahey
Biographic Data
| ID | 17038 |
|---|---|
| NAME | E Leahey |
| GIVEN NAMES | E |
| FAMILY NAME | Leahey |
| SIGNATURE | LEAHEY E |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Arizona |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-6023-9115 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 30 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 454 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 30 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2001 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2023 |
| H-INDEX | 12 |
Papers and patents are becoming less disruptive over time
What Types of Novelty Are Most Disruptive
Novelty and impact are key characteristics of the scientific enterprise. Classic theories of scientific change distinguish among different types of novelty and emphasize how a new idea interacts with previous work and influences future flows of knowledge. However, even recently developed measures of novelty remain unidimensional, and continued reliance on citation counts captures only the amount, but not the nature, of scientific impact. To bette…
Who Deserves Protection? How Naming Potential Beneficiaries Influences Covid-19 Vaccine Intentions
Typically, vaccination is perceived as self-interested act, but it is also a community-oriented action that benefits other members in society, as high vaccine uptake reduces disease transmission. Drawing on the notion of deservingness, the authors ran an online experiment ( n = 516) to assess whose interests motivate people from across the political spectrum to engage in a community-oriented action: the intention to receive a coronavirus disease …
What Catalyzes Research Universities to Commit to Interdisciplinary Research
Journal of Sociology and Social Welfare Vol. 47 No. 1
Welfare participation has been a longstanding issue of public debate for 50 years but remains largely understudied in welfare literature.The purpose of this research is to challenge the flawed assumptions of welfare participation by examining the varying spatial inequalities that influence U.S. welfare participation rates among eligible poor.This comparative analysis uses spatial inequality theory to examine welfareto-work participation rates in …
The Perks and Perils of Interdisciplinary Research
This paper synthesizes findings from two studies the author conducted that examine how engagement in interdisciplinary research (IDR) influences scholars’ careers. Results from these two studies, one large-scale and quantitative and the other small-scale and qualitative, provide a much needed empirical assessment of IDR’s effects on individual careers. In essence, they provide a nice antidote (and some caution) to the rhetoric and enthusiasm surr…
From Sole Investigator to Team Scientist: Trends in the Practice and Study of Research Collaboration
This article reviews trends in the practice and study of research collaboration, focusing on journal publications in academic science. I briefly describe the different styles and types of collaboration and then focus on the drivers of the trend toward increased collaboration and on its consequences for both individual researchers and science more generally. Scholarship on collaboration seems partial to delineating its benefits; this review highli…
The Joy of Science: Disciplinary Diversity in Emotional Accounts
Science and emotions are typically juxtaposed: science is considered rational and unattached to outcomes, whereas emotions are considered irrational and harmful to science. Ethnographic studies of the daily lives of scientists have problematized this opposition, focusing on the emotional experiences of scientists as they go about their work, but they reveal little about disciplinary differences. We build on these studies by analyzing Citation Cla…
Sociological Innovation through Subfield Integration
Is domain-spanning beneficial? Can it promote innovation? Classic research on recombinant innovation suggests that domain-spanning fosters the accumulation of diverse information and can thus be a springboard for fresh ideas—most of which emanate from the merger of extant ideas from distinct realms. But domain-spanning is also challenging to produce and to evaluate. Here, the domains of interest are subfields. We focus on subfield spanning in soc…
Cultural Correlates of Gender Integration in Science
Gender integration within science has been uneven: some fields have integrated women to almost equitable levels, while others remain male‐dominated. Explanations for this variation abound, but few are able to assess empirically the relevance of disciplinary cultures in a systematic way. We take up this challenge by analysing accounts of scientific success in fields that integrated women to a large degree (Psychology and the Life Sciences) and fie…
Straight from the source: Accounting for scientific success
How do highly cited scientists account for their success? A number of approaches have been used to explain scientific success, but none incorporates scientists’ own understandings, which are critical to a complete, process-oriented explanation. We remedy this oversight by incorporating scientists’ own descriptions of the value of their work, as reflected in essays written by authors of highly cited articles (‘Citation Classics’). As cultural obje…
No Decline, Just Loss of Dominance: A Prompt to Worry (a Bit) and Ask Why
Lawyers' Lines of Work: Specialization's Role in the Income Determination Process
Income inequality has been increasing in the United States, and intraoccupational processes are partly responsible (Kim and Sakamoto 2008; Mouw and Kalleberg 2010). To date, scholars have focused on suboccupational divisions, such as specialty areas, to understand why some members of an occupation earn more than others. In this article we theorize, operationalize, and assess the economic effect of another way in which members of the same professi…
Parenting and research productivity: New evidence and methods
To date, studies on how having children affects the research productivity of academics, and whether the effects differ by gender, have had inconsistent findings. Using nuanced measures of parental obligations and linear growth modeling, we analyzed the effects of children on the entire careers of academics in two disciplines — linguistics and sociology — and tested for differential effects by gender. In addition, we modeled not only productivity,…
Specialization and promotion in an academic discipline
Research Specialization and Collaboration Patterns in Sociology
Researchers interested in the structure of scientific fields have documented increases in specialization and collaboration. How, if at all, are these two trends related? Is specialization so severe that scholars cannot collaborate unless they share specific research interests? Or, have specializing tendencies promoted research that joins specialty areas and broaches new topics? We answer these important questions for a single discipline, sociolog…
Collaborative Research in Sociology: Trends and Contributing Factors
Overseeing Research Practice: The Case of Data Editing
This article examines whether and how a particular research practice is overseen and supervised, and by whom. This investigation fills notable gaps in the literature on science, including a lack of emphasis on larger sociopolitical structures, a neglect of regulation, and indifference toward ethics. The author focuses on the oversight of a particular research practice; data editing; which embodies qualities that are intriguing to sociologists of …
Gendered Academic Careers: Specializing for Success
In this article we take a longitudinal perspective to analyze gender differences in academic career attainment. We improve upon prior research both theoretically and methodologically. Theoretically, we incorporate the extent of research specialization as a form of professional capital that potentially improves productivity and visibility, especially for men. Methodologically, we introduce a measure of research specialization and examine how men's…
Methodological Memes and Mores: Toward a Sociology of Social Research
A plethora of scholarly research has been conducted on social science: on its organizational and communicative patterns, on the historical development of research standards, and on the diversity of local research practices. But this body of work on the sociology of social research does not hang together in ways that it could, and should, if knowledge is to accumulate. Contributors hail from various fields, subfields, theoretical perspectives, and…
Not by Productivity Alone: How Visibility and Specialization Contribute to Academic Earnings
The popular adage "publish or perish" has long defined individual career strategies as well as scholarly investigations of earnings inequality in academe, as researchers have relied heavily on research productivity to explain earnings inequality among faculty members. Academia, however, has changed dramatically in the last few decades: it has become larger and more demographically diverse, and fears of overspecialization prompt calls for interdis…
Convergence and confidentiality? Limits to the implementation of mixed methodology
Transmitting Tricks of the Trade: Advisors and the Development of Research Knowledge
How is sociological research practice learned? Because much of the tacit knowledge required to succeed in professions such as academia cannot be obtained formally, informal channels of learning—such as interaction with advisors—may be crucial. In this paper I test the extent to which graduate school advisors influence the development of their advisees' research habits, practices, and beliefs. I find that advisors' attitudes and intra-professional…
Gender Differences in Productivity: Research Specialization as a Missing Link
Since 1984, when Cole and Zuckerman referred to gender differences in productivity among academic scientists as a puzzle, sociologists have sought to explain these differences by incorporating primarily institutional-level factors. In addition to these factors, the author contends that an undertheorized and heretofore unmeasured concept-the extent of research specialization-can also help explain the process by which gender affects research produc…
Alphas and Asterisks: The Development of Statistical Significance Testing Standards in Sociology
In this paper, I trace the development of statistical significance testing standards in sociology by analyzing data from articles published in two prestigious sociology journals between 1935 and 2000. I focus on the role of two key elements in the diffusion literature, contagion and rationality, as well as the role of institutional factors. I find that statistical significance testing flourished in the 20th century. Contagion processes and the su…
Not by Productivity Alone: How Visibility and Specialization Contribute to Academic Earnings
The popular adage "publish or perish" has long defined individual career strategies as well as scholarly investigations of earnings inequality in academe, as researchers have relied heavily on research productivity to explain earnings inequality among faculty members. Academia, however, has changed dramatically in the last few decades: it has become larger and more demographically diverse, and fears of overspecialization prompt calls for interdis…
Parenting and research productivity: New evidence and methods
To date, studies on how having children affects the research productivity of academics, and whether the effects differ by gender, have had inconsistent findings. Using nuanced measures of parental obligations and linear growth modeling, we analyzed the effects of children on the entire careers of academics in two disciplines — linguistics and sociology — and tested for differential effects by gender. In addition, we modeled not only productivity,…
From Sole Investigator to Team Scientist: Trends in the Practice and Study of Research Collaboration
This article reviews trends in the practice and study of research collaboration, focusing on journal publications in academic science. I briefly describe the different styles and types of collaboration and then focus on the drivers of the trend toward increased collaboration and on its consequences for both individual researchers and science more generally. Scholarship on collaboration seems partial to delineating its benefits; this review highli…
Alphas and Asterisks: The Development of Statistical Significance Testing Standards in Sociology
In this paper, I trace the development of statistical significance testing standards in sociology by analyzing data from articles published in two prestigious sociology journals between 1935 and 2000. I focus on the role of two key elements in the diffusion literature, contagion and rationality, as well as the role of institutional factors. I find that statistical significance testing flourished in the 20th century. Contagion processes and the su…
Gender Differences in Productivity: Research Specialization as a Missing Link
Since 1984, when Cole and Zuckerman referred to gender differences in productivity among academic scientists as a puzzle, sociologists have sought to explain these differences by incorporating primarily institutional-level factors. In addition to these factors, the author contends that an undertheorized and heretofore unmeasured concept-the extent of research specialization-can also help explain the process by which gender affects research produc…
Methodological Memes and Mores: Toward a Sociology of Social Research
A plethora of scholarly research has been conducted on social science: on its organizational and communicative patterns, on the historical development of research standards, and on the diversity of local research practices. But this body of work on the sociology of social research does not hang together in ways that it could, and should, if knowledge is to accumulate. Contributors hail from various fields, subfields, theoretical perspectives, and…
Collaborative Research in Sociology: Trends and Contributing Factors
Research Specialization and Collaboration Patterns in Sociology
Researchers interested in the structure of scientific fields have documented increases in specialization and collaboration. How, if at all, are these two trends related? Is specialization so severe that scholars cannot collaborate unless they share specific research interests? Or, have specializing tendencies promoted research that joins specialty areas and broaches new topics? We answer these important questions for a single discipline, sociolog…
Sociological Innovation through Subfield Integration
Is domain-spanning beneficial? Can it promote innovation? Classic research on recombinant innovation suggests that domain-spanning fosters the accumulation of diverse information and can thus be a springboard for fresh ideas—most of which emanate from the merger of extant ideas from distinct realms. But domain-spanning is also challenging to produce and to evaluate. Here, the domains of interest are subfields. We focus on subfield spanning in soc…
Intellectuals and Democratization, 1905-1912 and 1989-1996
This article bridges the gap in studies of the social bases of democratization between qualitative studies focused on social groups and quantitative studies focused on national characteristics. Qualitative historical evidence suggests the importance of classes—in particular, the emerging class of intellectuals—in the wave of democratizations in the decade before World War I. Quantitative cross‐national data on a more recent wave of democratizatio…
Gender Differences in Mathematical Trajectories
In this article we test the hypothesis that male students outperform female students in mathematics. Using large national data sets and curvilinear growth models, we examine gender differences in mathematical trajectories from elementary school through high school. We analyze subsamples of high-scoring students and also different areas of math, such as reasoning and geometry. Despite relatively equal starting points in elementary school, and rela…
Cultural Correlates of Gender Integration in Science
Gender integration within science has been uneven: some fields have integrated women to almost equitable levels, while others remain male‐dominated. Explanations for this variation abound, but few are able to assess empirically the relevance of disciplinary cultures in a systematic way. We take up this challenge by analysing accounts of scientific success in fields that integrated women to a large degree (Psychology and the Life Sciences) and fie…
Specialization and promotion in an academic discipline
Straight from the source: Accounting for scientific success
How do highly cited scientists account for their success? A number of approaches have been used to explain scientific success, but none incorporates scientists’ own understandings, which are critical to a complete, process-oriented explanation. We remedy this oversight by incorporating scientists’ own descriptions of the value of their work, as reflected in essays written by authors of highly cited articles (‘Citation Classics’). As cultural obje…
Transmitting Tricks of the Trade: Advisors and the Development of Research Knowledge
How is sociological research practice learned? Because much of the tacit knowledge required to succeed in professions such as academia cannot be obtained formally, informal channels of learning—such as interaction with advisors—may be crucial. In this paper I test the extent to which graduate school advisors influence the development of their advisees' research habits, practices, and beliefs. I find that advisors' attitudes and intra-professional…
Overseeing Research Practice: The Case of Data Editing
This article examines whether and how a particular research practice is overseen and supervised, and by whom. This investigation fills notable gaps in the literature on science, including a lack of emphasis on larger sociopolitical structures, a neglect of regulation, and indifference toward ethics. The author focuses on the oversight of a particular research practice; data editing; which embodies qualities that are intriguing to sociologists of …
Diversity in Everyday Research Practice: The Case of Data Editing
How should social science researchers deal with data inaccuracies? This article uses Web-based survey data collected from faculty members in three social science disciplines to document variation in views about data editing. Through an analysis of qualitative responses to a hypothetical vignette, the authors demonstrate that a wide range of opinion surrounds the 'proper' use of data. Reactions are to some extent contingent on discipline and exper…
Convergence and confidentiality? Limits to the implementation of mixed methodology
The role of status in evaluating research: The Case of Data Editing
The Joy of Science: Disciplinary Diversity in Emotional Accounts
Science and emotions are typically juxtaposed: science is considered rational and unattached to outcomes, whereas emotions are considered irrational and harmful to science. Ethnographic studies of the daily lives of scientists have problematized this opposition, focusing on the emotional experiences of scientists as they go about their work, but they reveal little about disciplinary differences. We build on these studies by analyzing Citation Cla…
Gendered Academic Careers: Specializing for Success
In this article we take a longitudinal perspective to analyze gender differences in academic career attainment. We improve upon prior research both theoretically and methodologically. Theoretically, we incorporate the extent of research specialization as a form of professional capital that potentially improves productivity and visibility, especially for men. Methodologically, we introduce a measure of research specialization and examine how men's…
Who Deserves Protection? How Naming Potential Beneficiaries Influences Covid-19 Vaccine Intentions
Typically, vaccination is perceived as self-interested act, but it is also a community-oriented action that benefits other members in society, as high vaccine uptake reduces disease transmission. Drawing on the notion of deservingness, the authors ran an online experiment ( n = 516) to assess whose interests motivate people from across the political spectrum to engage in a community-oriented action: the intention to receive a coronavirus disease …
What Types of Novelty Are Most Disruptive
Novelty and impact are key characteristics of the scientific enterprise. Classic theories of scientific change distinguish among different types of novelty and emphasize how a new idea interacts with previous work and influences future flows of knowledge. However, even recently developed measures of novelty remain unidimensional, and continued reliance on citation counts captures only the amount, but not the nature, of scientific impact. To bette…
The Perks and Perils of Interdisciplinary Research
This paper synthesizes findings from two studies the author conducted that examine how engagement in interdisciplinary research (IDR) influences scholars’ careers. Results from these two studies, one large-scale and quantitative and the other small-scale and qualitative, provide a much needed empirical assessment of IDR’s effects on individual careers. In essence, they provide a nice antidote (and some caution) to the rhetoric and enthusiasm surr…
Gender Differences in Mathematical Trajectories
In this article we test the hypothesis that male students outperform female students in mathematics. Using large national data sets and curvilinear growth models, we examine gender differences in mathematical trajectories from elementary school through high school. We analyze subsamples of high-scoring students and also different areas of math, such as reasoning and geometry. Despite relatively equal starting points in elementary school, and rela…
Assessing Benefits in Clinical Research: Why Diversity in Benefit Assessment Can Be Risky
Larry R. Churchill, Daniel K. Nelson, Gail E. Henderson, Nancy M. P. King, Arlene M. Davis, Erin Leahey, Benjamin S. Wilfond, Assessing Benefits in Clinical Research: Why Diversity in Benefit Assessment Can Be Risky, IRB: Ethics & Human Research, Vol. 25, No. 3 (May - Jun., 2003), pp. 1-8
Diversity in Everyday Research Practice: The Case of Data Editing
How should social science researchers deal with data inaccuracies? This article uses Web-based survey data collected from faculty members in three social science disciplines to document variation in views about data editing. Through an analysis of qualitative responses to a hypothetical vignette, the authors demonstrate that a wide range of opinion surrounds the 'proper' use of data. Reactions are to some extent contingent on discipline and exper…
Intellectuals and Democratization, 1905-1912 and 1989-1996
This article bridges the gap in studies of the social bases of democratization between qualitative studies focused on social groups and quantitative studies focused on national characteristics. Qualitative historical evidence suggests the importance of classes—in particular, the emerging class of intellectuals—in the wave of democratizations in the decade before World War I. Quantitative cross‐national data on a more recent wave of democratizatio…
The role of status in evaluating research: The Case of Data Editing
Alphas and Asterisks: The Development of Statistical Significance Testing Standards in Sociology
In this paper, I trace the development of statistical significance testing standards in sociology by analyzing data from articles published in two prestigious sociology journals between 1935 and 2000. I focus on the role of two key elements in the diffusion literature, contagion and rationality, as well as the role of institutional factors. I find that statistical significance testing flourished in the 20th century. Contagion processes and the su…
Transmitting Tricks of the Trade: Advisors and the Development of Research Knowledge
How is sociological research practice learned? Because much of the tacit knowledge required to succeed in professions such as academia cannot be obtained formally, informal channels of learning—such as interaction with advisors—may be crucial. In this paper I test the extent to which graduate school advisors influence the development of their advisees' research habits, practices, and beliefs. I find that advisors' attitudes and intra-professional…
Gender Differences in Productivity: Research Specialization as a Missing Link
Since 1984, when Cole and Zuckerman referred to gender differences in productivity among academic scientists as a puzzle, sociologists have sought to explain these differences by incorporating primarily institutional-level factors. In addition to these factors, the author contends that an undertheorized and heretofore unmeasured concept-the extent of research specialization-can also help explain the process by which gender affects research produc…
Not by Productivity Alone: How Visibility and Specialization Contribute to Academic Earnings
The popular adage "publish or perish" has long defined individual career strategies as well as scholarly investigations of earnings inequality in academe, as researchers have relied heavily on research productivity to explain earnings inequality among faculty members. Academia, however, has changed dramatically in the last few decades: it has become larger and more demographically diverse, and fears of overspecialization prompt calls for interdis…
Convergence and confidentiality? Limits to the implementation of mixed methodology
Research Specialization and Collaboration Patterns in Sociology
Researchers interested in the structure of scientific fields have documented increases in specialization and collaboration. How, if at all, are these two trends related? Is specialization so severe that scholars cannot collaborate unless they share specific research interests? Or, have specializing tendencies promoted research that joins specialty areas and broaches new topics? We answer these important questions for a single discipline, sociolog…
Collaborative Research in Sociology: Trends and Contributing Factors
Overseeing Research Practice: The Case of Data Editing
This article examines whether and how a particular research practice is overseen and supervised, and by whom. This investigation fills notable gaps in the literature on science, including a lack of emphasis on larger sociopolitical structures, a neglect of regulation, and indifference toward ethics. The author focuses on the oversight of a particular research practice; data editing; which embodies qualities that are intriguing to sociologists of …
Gendered Academic Careers: Specializing for Success
In this article we take a longitudinal perspective to analyze gender differences in academic career attainment. We improve upon prior research both theoretically and methodologically. Theoretically, we incorporate the extent of research specialization as a form of professional capital that potentially improves productivity and visibility, especially for men. Methodologically, we introduce a measure of research specialization and examine how men's…
Methodological Memes and Mores: Toward a Sociology of Social Research
A plethora of scholarly research has been conducted on social science: on its organizational and communicative patterns, on the historical development of research standards, and on the diversity of local research practices. But this body of work on the sociology of social research does not hang together in ways that it could, and should, if knowledge is to accumulate. Contributors hail from various fields, subfields, theoretical perspectives, and…
Specialization and promotion in an academic discipline
Parenting and research productivity: New evidence and methods
To date, studies on how having children affects the research productivity of academics, and whether the effects differ by gender, have had inconsistent findings. Using nuanced measures of parental obligations and linear growth modeling, we analyzed the effects of children on the entire careers of academics in two disciplines — linguistics and sociology — and tested for differential effects by gender. In addition, we modeled not only productivity,…
Lawyers' Lines of Work: Specialization's Role in the Income Determination Process
Income inequality has been increasing in the United States, and intraoccupational processes are partly responsible (Kim and Sakamoto 2008; Mouw and Kalleberg 2010). To date, scholars have focused on suboccupational divisions, such as specialty areas, to understand why some members of an occupation earn more than others. In this article we theorize, operationalize, and assess the economic effect of another way in which members of the same professi…
Straight from the source: Accounting for scientific success
How do highly cited scientists account for their success? A number of approaches have been used to explain scientific success, but none incorporates scientists’ own understandings, which are critical to a complete, process-oriented explanation. We remedy this oversight by incorporating scientists’ own descriptions of the value of their work, as reflected in essays written by authors of highly cited articles (‘Citation Classics’). As cultural obje…
No Decline, Just Loss of Dominance: A Prompt to Worry (a Bit) and Ask Why
Sociological Innovation through Subfield Integration
Is domain-spanning beneficial? Can it promote innovation? Classic research on recombinant innovation suggests that domain-spanning fosters the accumulation of diverse information and can thus be a springboard for fresh ideas—most of which emanate from the merger of extant ideas from distinct realms. But domain-spanning is also challenging to produce and to evaluate. Here, the domains of interest are subfields. We focus on subfield spanning in soc…
Cultural Correlates of Gender Integration in Science
Gender integration within science has been uneven: some fields have integrated women to almost equitable levels, while others remain male‐dominated. Explanations for this variation abound, but few are able to assess empirically the relevance of disciplinary cultures in a systematic way. We take up this challenge by analysing accounts of scientific success in fields that integrated women to a large degree (Psychology and the Life Sciences) and fie…
The Joy of Science: Disciplinary Diversity in Emotional Accounts
Science and emotions are typically juxtaposed: science is considered rational and unattached to outcomes, whereas emotions are considered irrational and harmful to science. Ethnographic studies of the daily lives of scientists have problematized this opposition, focusing on the emotional experiences of scientists as they go about their work, but they reveal little about disciplinary differences. We build on these studies by analyzing Citation Cla…
From Sole Investigator to Team Scientist: Trends in the Practice and Study of Research Collaboration
This article reviews trends in the practice and study of research collaboration, focusing on journal publications in academic science. I briefly describe the different styles and types of collaboration and then focus on the drivers of the trend toward increased collaboration and on its consequences for both individual researchers and science more generally. Scholarship on collaboration seems partial to delineating its benefits; this review highli…
The Perks and Perils of Interdisciplinary Research
This paper synthesizes findings from two studies the author conducted that examine how engagement in interdisciplinary research (IDR) influences scholars’ careers. Results from these two studies, one large-scale and quantitative and the other small-scale and qualitative, provide a much needed empirical assessment of IDR’s effects on individual careers. In essence, they provide a nice antidote (and some caution) to the rhetoric and enthusiasm surr…
Sociology (23 works) · Psychology (19 works) · Political science (16 works) · Social science (15 works) · Computer Science (13 works) · Epistemology (13 works) · Economics (12 works) · scientometrics and bibliometrics research (11 works) · Law (10 works) · Social Psychology (9 works)