D A Mcfarland
Biographic Data
| ID | 68443 |
|---|---|
| NAME | D A Mcfarland |
| GIVEN NAMES | D A |
| FAMILY NAME | Mcfarland |
| SIGNATURE | MCFARLAND D A |
| AFFILIATIONS | Stanford University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-6805-0798 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 39 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 785 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 39 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2001 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 13 |
How Values and Uncertainty Shape Scientific Advance in Peer Review
Tens of thousands of scientists contribute to peer review as journal editors and reviewers of the millions of manuscripts submitted every year. How do they decide what is quality work? What values do they apply in evaluating which science merits publication and which does not? How do they respond to dissensus and uncertainty? Who has the greatest influence over the final outcome? This study combines close reading with large language models to ana…
Network ecology: Tie fitness in social context(s)
Social relations are embedded in material, cultural, and institutional settings that affect network dynamics and the resulting topologies. For example, romantic entanglements are subject to social and cultural norms, interfirm alliances are constrained by country-specific legislation, and adolescent friendships are conditioned by classroom settings and neighborhood effects. In short, social contexts shape social relations and the networks they gi…
Interdisciplinary Research, Tenure Review, and Guardians of the Disciplinary Order
While interdisciplinarity has been promoted in universities for decades, research suggests that untenured faculty struggle to receive recognition for their interdisciplinary research.Informed by the microfoundations of institutional theory and discursive legitimation, we examine how members of academic departments participate in the legitimation and reproduction of tenure and promotion norms in relation to disciplinary and interdisciplinary resea…
Coming into relations: How communication reveals and persuades relational decisions
Network Ecology: Introduction to the Special Issue
Network ecology: Tie fitness in social context(s)
Social relations are embedded in material, cultural, and institutional settings that affect network dynamics and the resulting topologies. For example, romantic entanglements are subject to social and cultural norms, interfirm alliances are constrained by country-specific legislation, and adolescent friendships are conditioned by classroom settings and neighborhood effects. In short, social contexts shape social relations and the networks they gi…
When ERGMs Lead to Biased Samples: Reply to Kretschmer et al
How New Ideas Diffuse in Science
What conditions enable novel intellectual contributions to diffuse and become integrated into later scientific work? Prior work tends to focus on whole cultural products, such as patents and articles, and emphasizes external social factors as important. This article focuses on concepts as reflections of ideas, and we identify the combined influence that social factors and internal intellectual structures have on ideational diffusion. To develop t…
Abstract(s) at the core: A case study of disciplinary identity in the field of linguistics
Networking a career: Individual adaptation in the network ecology of faculty
Diversifying the Professoriate
The primary means of social and intellectual reproduction in the professoriate is through mentoring doctoral students who become faculty mentors and publish research. However, opportunities to transition into such roles are not equal, and underrepresented groups face challenges building and sustaining their representation in the professoriate. What are social resources enabling them to overcome these challenges? To study this, the authors analyze…
Writing into relationships
Facets of Specialization and Its Relation to Career Success: An Analysis of U.S. Sociology, 1980 to 2015
We investigate how sociology students garner recognition from niche field audiences through specialization. Our dataset comprises over 80,000 sociology-related dissertations completed at U.S. universities, as well as data on graduates’ pursuant publications. We analyze different facets of how students specialize—topic choice, focus, novelty, and consistency. To measure specialization types within a consistent methodological frame, we utilize stru…
Creative Destruction: The Structural Consequences of Scientific Curation
Communication of scientific findings is fundamental to scholarly discourse. In this article, we show that academic review articles, a quintessential form of interpretive scholarly output, perform curatorial work that substantially transforms the research communities they aim to summarize. Using a corpus of millions of journal articles, we analyze the consequences of review articles for the publications they cite, focusing on citation and co-citat…
The Diversity–Innovation Paradox in Science
Significance By analyzing data from nearly all US PhD recipients and their dissertations across three decades, this paper finds demographically underrepresented students innovate at higher rates than majority students, but their novel contributions are discounted and less likely to earn them academic positions. The discounting of minorities’ innovations may partly explain their underrepresentation in influential positions of academia.
The Meeting of Minds: Forging Social and Intellectual Networks within Universities
How are social and intellectual relations structured and given shape within research universities? To answer these questions, we test to what extent various theoretically predicted processes explain the dynamics of academics’ networks of collaboration and shared language use in a unique longitudinal data set (1994 to 2005) of 2,631 faculty at a large private American university. Using the latest advances in stochastic actor-oriented models (in RS…
Paradigm Wars Revisited: A Cartography of Graduate Research in the Field of Education (1980–2010)
Education entails conflicting perspectives about its subject matter. In the late 1980s, the conflict developed into a war between interpretive and causal paradigms. Did the confrontation result in a balance between these warring sides? We use text analysis to identify research trends in 137,024 dissertation abstracts from 1980 to 2010 and relate these to students’ academic employment outcomes. Topics associated with the interpretive approach rose…
The Patterning of Collaborative Behavior and Knowledge Culminations in Interdisciplinary Research Centers
Due to investments in interdisciplinary research endeavors, the number and variety of interdisciplinary research centers have grown exponentially during the past decades. While interdisciplinary research centers rely on varied organizational arrangements, we know little about the conditions and processes that mediate collaborative arrangements and interdisciplinary research outcomes. This study examines how different collaborative arrangements sh…
Measuring Paradigmaticness of Disciplines Using Text
In this paper, we describe new methods that use the text of publications to measure the paradigmaticness of disciplines. Drawing on the text of published articles in the Web of Science, we build samples of disciplinary discourse. Using these language samples, we measure the two core concepts of paradigmaticness—consensus and rapid discovery (Collins 1994)—and show the relative positioning of eight example disciplines on each of these measures. Ou…
Sociology in the Era of Big Data: The Ascent of Forensic Social Science
Ethnic Composition and Friendship Segregation: Differential Effects for Adolescent Natives and Immigrants
Ethnically diverse settings provide opportunities for interethnic friendship but can also increase the preference for same-ethnic friendship. Therefore, same-ethnic friendship preferences, or ethnic homophily, can work at cross-purposes with policy recommendations to diversify ethnic representation in social settings. In order to effectively overcome ethnic segregation, we need to identify those factors within diverse settings that exacerbate the…
The Organization of Schools and Classrooms
Schools are complex organizations and their functioning involves far more than just the delivery of academic content. Existing research establishes the importance of taking such organizational features into account in examining how important school outcomes such as academic achievement are shaped by the relationships, interactions, and experiences of students and teachers. Standard approaches, however; tend to treat the organizational structures …
Streams of Thought: Knowledge Flows and Intellectual Cohesion in a Multidisciplinary Era
Journal Article Streams of Thought: Knowledge Flows and Intellectual Cohesion in a Multidisciplinary Era Get access Craig M. Rawlings, Craig M. Rawlings University of California–Santa Barbara Please direct correspondence to Craig M. Rawlings, Sociology Department SSMS 3407, UCSB, Santa Barbara, CA 93106, USA; E-mail: [email protected]. Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Daniel A. McFarland, Daniel A. McFa…
Big Data and the danger of being precisely inaccurate
Social scientists and data analysts are increasingly making use of Big Data in their analyses. These data sets are often "found data" arising from purely observational sources rather than data derived under strict rules of a statistically designed experiment. However, since these large data sets easily meet the sample size requirements of most statistical procedures, they give analysts a false sense of security as they proceed to focus on employi…
Network Ecology and Adolescent Social Structure
Adolescent societies-whether arising from weak, short-term classroom friendships or from close, long-term friendships-exhibit various levels of network clustering, segregation, and hierarchy. Some are rank-ordered caste systems and others are flat, cliquish worlds. Explaining the source of such structural variation remains a challenge, however, because global network features are generally treated as the agglomeration of micro-level tie-formation…
Bowling Young: How Youth Voluntary Associations Influence Adult Political Participation
Do the voluntary activities of youth increase political engagement in adulthood? Political participation is typically characterized by inertia: reproduced within families, highly correlated with social class, and largely stable after the onset of adulthood. This research illustrates an element of political socialization that occurs just before the transition into full citizenship, that mimics adult civic life, and that can be available regardless…
Network Ecology and Adolescent Social Structure
Adolescent societies-whether arising from weak, short-term classroom friendships or from close, long-term friendships-exhibit various levels of network clustering, segregation, and hierarchy. Some are rank-ordered caste systems and others are flat, cliquish worlds. Explaining the source of such structural variation remains a challenge, however, because global network features are generally treated as the agglomeration of micro-level tie-formation…
Ethnic Composition and Friendship Segregation: Differential Effects for Adolescent Natives and Immigrants
Ethnically diverse settings provide opportunities for interethnic friendship but can also increase the preference for same-ethnic friendship. Therefore, same-ethnic friendship preferences, or ethnic homophily, can work at cross-purposes with policy recommendations to diversify ethnic representation in social settings. In order to effectively overcome ethnic segregation, we need to identify those factors within diverse settings that exacerbate the…
Student Resistance: How the Formal and Informal Organization of Classrooms Facilitate Everyday Forms of Student Defiance
Critical and resistance theorists propose that race and class backgrounds influence everyday forms of student resistance in schools. This article argues that the microsocial process of student defiance is less characterized by individual traits of race and class than by the formal and informal organizational characteristics of social settings. Using unique data on resistance in multiple schools and classrooms, this article finds that defiant beha…
Dynamic Network Visualization
Increased interest in longitudinal social networks and the recognition that visualization fosters theoretical insight create a need for dynamic network visualizations, or network “movies. ” This article confronts theoretical questions surrounding the temporal representations of social networks and technical questions about how best to link network change to changes in the graphical representation. The authors divide network movies into (1) static…
Sociology in the Era of Big Data: The Ascent of Forensic Social Science
Motives and Contexts of Identity Change: A Case for Network Effects
In this paper we interrelate different theories of identity and describe how various social contexts and cognitive motives influence the process of identity change. We consider two competing theories about the linkage of contexts with motives for identity change: the effect of category traits, based on social identity theory, and the effect of social networks, based on identity theory. To explore these relations, we use data collected on more tha…
Resistance as a Social Drama: A Study of Change-Oriented Encounters
Resistance is a change‐oriented process that follows certain stereotyped sequences of behaviors. These sequences are promulgated by intentional actors who cue cultural forms (rituals) in order to guide interaction. This process can be understood as a social drama composed of four stages: breach, crisis, redress, and reintegration. Using interviews and ethnographic accounts of behaviors in 165 classrooms at two high schools, this article describes…
Toward a Historical Sociology of Social Situations
In recent years there has been a growing call to historicize sociology by paying more attention to the contextual importance of time and place as well as to issues of process and contingency. Meeting this goal requires bringing historical sociology and interactionism into greater conversation via a historical theory of social situations. Toward this end, the authors of this article draw on Erving Goffman's work in Frame Analysis to conceptualize …
Differentiating language usage through topic models
Making the Connection: Social Bonding in Courtship Situations
Sociologists have long argued that the force of a social bond resides in a sense of interpersonal connection. This is especially true for initial courtship encounters when pairs report a sense of interpersonal chemistry. The authors explore the process of romantic bonding by applying interaction ritual theory, extended and integrated with methods from computational linguistics, to the study of courtship encounters and, specifically, heterosexual …
Curricular Flows: Trajectories, Turning Points, and Assignment Criteria in High School Math Careers
What do course trajectories look like? Do career paths intersect? Do courses assume distinct roles in educational careers? What factors lead students to adopt various curricular moves? This article addresses these questions by examining the structure and dynamics of participant flows across courses in two high school math curricula. Drawing on Markov models and network analytic methods, it examines the length, rate of progression, volume, and dir…
Creative Destruction: The Structural Consequences of Scientific Curation
Communication of scientific findings is fundamental to scholarly discourse. In this article, we show that academic review articles, a quintessential form of interpretive scholarly output, perform curatorial work that substantially transforms the research communities they aim to summarize. Using a corpus of millions of journal articles, we analyze the consequences of review articles for the publications they cite, focusing on citation and co-citat…
Influence flows in the academy: Using affiliation networks to assess peer effects among researchers
How New Ideas Diffuse in Science
What conditions enable novel intellectual contributions to diffuse and become integrated into later scientific work? Prior work tends to focus on whole cultural products, such as patents and articles, and emphasizes external social factors as important. This article focuses on concepts as reflections of ideas, and we identify the combined influence that social factors and internal intellectual structures have on ideational diffusion. To develop t…
The Meeting of Minds: Forging Social and Intellectual Networks within Universities
How are social and intellectual relations structured and given shape within research universities? To answer these questions, we test to what extent various theoretically predicted processes explain the dynamics of academics’ networks of collaboration and shared language use in a unique longitudinal data set (1994 to 2005) of 2,631 faculty at a large private American university. Using the latest advances in stochastic actor-oriented models (in RS…
Measuring Paradigmaticness of Disciplines Using Text
In this paper, we describe new methods that use the text of publications to measure the paradigmaticness of disciplines. Drawing on the text of published articles in the Web of Science, we build samples of disciplinary discourse. Using these language samples, we measure the two core concepts of paradigmaticness—consensus and rapid discovery (Collins 1994)—and show the relative positioning of eight example disciplines on each of these measures. Ou…
Classroom Ordering and the Situational Imperatives of Routine and Ritual
This article contends that the problem of classroom order rests less in the roles and compositions of classrooms than in the multidimensional nature of their social situations. Classroom order arises from the dynamic relationship between distinct situational requirements: the coordination of interaction into institutionalized patterns (routine) and the validation of participants' identities (ritual). Utilizing a unique data set of more than 800,0…
Big Data and the danger of being precisely inaccurate
Social scientists and data analysts are increasingly making use of Big Data in their analyses. These data sets are often "found data" arising from purely observational sources rather than data derived under strict rules of a statistically designed experiment. However, since these large data sets easily meet the sample size requirements of most statistical procedures, they give analysts a false sense of security as they proceed to focus on employi…
Paradigm Wars Revisited: A Cartography of Graduate Research in the Field of Education (1980–2010)
Education entails conflicting perspectives about its subject matter. In the late 1980s, the conflict developed into a war between interpretive and causal paradigms. Did the confrontation result in a balance between these warring sides? We use text analysis to identify research trends in 137,024 dissertation abstracts from 1980 to 2010 and relate these to students’ academic employment outcomes. Topics associated with the interpretive approach rose…
Network Ecology: Introduction to the Special Issue
Diversifying the Professoriate
The primary means of social and intellectual reproduction in the professoriate is through mentoring doctoral students who become faculty mentors and publish research. However, opportunities to transition into such roles are not equal, and underrepresented groups face challenges building and sustaining their representation in the professoriate. What are social resources enabling them to overcome these challenges? To study this, the authors analyze…
Writing into relationships
Facets of Specialization and Its Relation to Career Success: An Analysis of U.S. Sociology, 1980 to 2015
We investigate how sociology students garner recognition from niche field audiences through specialization. Our dataset comprises over 80,000 sociology-related dissertations completed at U.S. universities, as well as data on graduates’ pursuant publications. We analyze different facets of how students specialize—topic choice, focus, novelty, and consistency. To measure specialization types within a consistent methodological frame, we utilize stru…
The Patterning of Collaborative Behavior and Knowledge Culminations in Interdisciplinary Research Centers
Due to investments in interdisciplinary research endeavors, the number and variety of interdisciplinary research centers have grown exponentially during the past decades. While interdisciplinary research centers rely on varied organizational arrangements, we know little about the conditions and processes that mediate collaborative arrangements and interdisciplinary research outcomes. This study examines how different collaborative arrangements sh…
Student Resistance: How the Formal and Informal Organization of Classrooms Facilitate Everyday Forms of Student Defiance
Critical and resistance theorists propose that race and class backgrounds influence everyday forms of student resistance in schools. This article argues that the microsocial process of student defiance is less characterized by individual traits of race and class than by the formal and informal organizational characteristics of social settings. Using unique data on resistance in multiple schools and classrooms, this article finds that defiant beha…
Resistance as a Social Drama: A Study of Change-Oriented Encounters
Resistance is a change‐oriented process that follows certain stereotyped sequences of behaviors. These sequences are promulgated by intentional actors who cue cultural forms (rituals) in order to guide interaction. This process can be understood as a social drama composed of four stages: breach, crisis, redress, and reintegration. Using interviews and ethnographic accounts of behaviors in 165 classrooms at two high schools, this article describes…
Motives and Contexts of Identity Change: A Case for Network Effects
In this paper we interrelate different theories of identity and describe how various social contexts and cognitive motives influence the process of identity change. We consider two competing theories about the linkage of contexts with motives for identity change: the effect of category traits, based on social identity theory, and the effect of social networks, based on identity theory. To explore these relations, we use data collected on more tha…
Dynamic Network Visualization
Increased interest in longitudinal social networks and the recognition that visualization fosters theoretical insight create a need for dynamic network visualizations, or network “movies. ” This article confronts theoretical questions surrounding the temporal representations of social networks and technical questions about how best to link network change to changes in the graphical representation. The authors divide network movies into (1) static…
Bowling Young: How Youth Voluntary Associations Influence Adult Political Participation
Do the voluntary activities of youth increase political engagement in adulthood? Political participation is typically characterized by inertia: reproduced within families, highly correlated with social class, and largely stable after the onset of adulthood. This research illustrates an element of political socialization that occurs just before the transition into full citizenship, that mimics adult civic life, and that can be available regardless…
Curricular Flows: Trajectories, Turning Points, and Assignment Criteria in High School Math Careers
What do course trajectories look like? Do career paths intersect? Do courses assume distinct roles in educational careers? What factors lead students to adopt various curricular moves? This article addresses these questions by examining the structure and dynamics of participant flows across courses in two high school math curricula. Drawing on Markov models and network analytic methods, it examines the length, rate of progression, volume, and dir…
Organization by Design: Supply- and Demand-side Models of Mathematics Course Taking
Prior work has proposed different theoretical mechanisms to explain students' course-taking patterns in schools. On the one hand, there are oversocialized accounts that claim that rules, social background factors, and supply-side factors shape observed career patterns. On the other hand, there are undersocialized accounts that claim that the decisions of strategic agents and demand-side dynamics shape course-taking careers. In this article, the a…
Toward a Historical Sociology of Social Situations
In recent years there has been a growing call to historicize sociology by paying more attention to the contextual importance of time and place as well as to issues of process and contingency. Meeting this goal requires bringing historical sociology and interactionism into greater conversation via a historical theory of social situations. Toward this end, the authors of this article draw on Erving Goffman's work in Frame Analysis to conceptualize …
Influence flows in the academy: Using affiliation networks to assess peer effects among researchers
Measurement error in network data: A re-classification
Classroom Ordering and the Situational Imperatives of Routine and Ritual
This article contends that the problem of classroom order rests less in the roles and compositions of classrooms than in the multidimensional nature of their social situations. Classroom order arises from the dynamic relationship between distinct situational requirements: the coordination of interaction into institutionalized patterns (routine) and the validation of participants' identities (ritual). Utilizing a unique data set of more than 800,0…
Ties That Last: Tie Formation and Persistence in Research Collaborations over Time
Using a longitudinal dataset of research collaborations over 15 years at Stanford University, we build a theory of intraorganizational task relationships that distinguishes the different factors associated with the formation and persistence of network ties. We highlight six factors: shared organizational foci, shared traits and interests, tie advantages from popularity, tie reinforcement from third parties, tie strength and multiplexity, and the …
Differentiating language usage through topic models
Making the Connection: Social Bonding in Courtship Situations
Sociologists have long argued that the force of a social bond resides in a sense of interpersonal connection. This is especially true for initial courtship encounters when pairs report a sense of interpersonal chemistry. The authors explore the process of romantic bonding by applying interaction ritual theory, extended and integrated with methods from computational linguistics, to the study of courtship encounters and, specifically, heterosexual …
Network Ecology and Adolescent Social Structure
Adolescent societies-whether arising from weak, short-term classroom friendships or from close, long-term friendships-exhibit various levels of network clustering, segregation, and hierarchy. Some are rank-ordered caste systems and others are flat, cliquish worlds. Explaining the source of such structural variation remains a challenge, however, because global network features are generally treated as the agglomeration of micro-level tie-formation…
The Organization of Schools and Classrooms
Schools are complex organizations and their functioning involves far more than just the delivery of academic content. Existing research establishes the importance of taking such organizational features into account in examining how important school outcomes such as academic achievement are shaped by the relationships, interactions, and experiences of students and teachers. Standard approaches, however; tend to treat the organizational structures …
Streams of Thought: Knowledge Flows and Intellectual Cohesion in a Multidisciplinary Era
Journal Article Streams of Thought: Knowledge Flows and Intellectual Cohesion in a Multidisciplinary Era Get access Craig M. Rawlings, Craig M. Rawlings University of California–Santa Barbara Please direct correspondence to Craig M. Rawlings, Sociology Department SSMS 3407, UCSB, Santa Barbara, CA 93106, USA; E-mail: [email protected]. Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Daniel A. McFarland, Daniel A. McFa…
Big Data and the danger of being precisely inaccurate
Social scientists and data analysts are increasingly making use of Big Data in their analyses. These data sets are often "found data" arising from purely observational sources rather than data derived under strict rules of a statistically designed experiment. However, since these large data sets easily meet the sample size requirements of most statistical procedures, they give analysts a false sense of security as they proceed to focus on employi…
Measuring Paradigmaticness of Disciplines Using Text
In this paper, we describe new methods that use the text of publications to measure the paradigmaticness of disciplines. Drawing on the text of published articles in the Web of Science, we build samples of disciplinary discourse. Using these language samples, we measure the two core concepts of paradigmaticness—consensus and rapid discovery (Collins 1994)—and show the relative positioning of eight example disciplines on each of these measures. Ou…
Sociology in the Era of Big Data: The Ascent of Forensic Social Science
Ethnic Composition and Friendship Segregation: Differential Effects for Adolescent Natives and Immigrants
Ethnically diverse settings provide opportunities for interethnic friendship but can also increase the preference for same-ethnic friendship. Therefore, same-ethnic friendship preferences, or ethnic homophily, can work at cross-purposes with policy recommendations to diversify ethnic representation in social settings. In order to effectively overcome ethnic segregation, we need to identify those factors within diverse settings that exacerbate the…
The Patterning of Collaborative Behavior and Knowledge Culminations in Interdisciplinary Research Centers
Due to investments in interdisciplinary research endeavors, the number and variety of interdisciplinary research centers have grown exponentially during the past decades. While interdisciplinary research centers rely on varied organizational arrangements, we know little about the conditions and processes that mediate collaborative arrangements and interdisciplinary research outcomes. This study examines how different collaborative arrangements sh…
The Diversity–Innovation Paradox in Science
Significance By analyzing data from nearly all US PhD recipients and their dissertations across three decades, this paper finds demographically underrepresented students innovate at higher rates than majority students, but their novel contributions are discounted and less likely to earn them academic positions. The discounting of minorities’ innovations may partly explain their underrepresentation in influential positions of academia.
The Meeting of Minds: Forging Social and Intellectual Networks within Universities
How are social and intellectual relations structured and given shape within research universities? To answer these questions, we test to what extent various theoretically predicted processes explain the dynamics of academics’ networks of collaboration and shared language use in a unique longitudinal data set (1994 to 2005) of 2,631 faculty at a large private American university. Using the latest advances in stochastic actor-oriented models (in RS…
Paradigm Wars Revisited: A Cartography of Graduate Research in the Field of Education (1980–2010)
Education entails conflicting perspectives about its subject matter. In the late 1980s, the conflict developed into a war between interpretive and causal paradigms. Did the confrontation result in a balance between these warring sides? We use text analysis to identify research trends in 137,024 dissertation abstracts from 1980 to 2010 and relate these to students’ academic employment outcomes. Topics associated with the interpretive approach rose…
Psychology (24 works) · Sociology (24 works) · Computer Science (23 works) · Social Psychology (17 works) · Political science (16 works) · Social Capital and Networks (14 works) · Complex Network Analysis Techniques (12 works) · Social science (11 works) · scientometrics and bibliometrics research (9 works) · Social Psychology (8 works)