International Symposium on Scientific Elites:
Concentration and Inequality

The social hierarchies, inequalities and elite aspects of academic research have occupied scientists for decades. Research on scientific elites is concerned with the concentration of resources, awards and prizes, prestige and influence, the hierarchies of science and their inherent inequalities, the underlying structures of science, and how social mechanisms between elite researchers shape the boundaries of academic research.

Research in this area spans from the sociology of science over scientometrics and economics of science to the more recent field science of science. While early studies often focused on small groups of individuals, such as Nobel Prize laureates, recent advances in computational power and data availability have spurred large-scale, global studies of more complete networks, hierarchies, and populations.

Call for Abstracts

As part of the ‘Scientific Elites’ project funded by the Independent Research Fund Denmark (see more on this website), we invite interested scientists to participate in a 2-day academic discussion on recent developments in the study of elites. The symposium will cover invited talks by leading scholars in the field and shorter presentations of new research by the attendees (please see our details below). As this is not a full conference, but a smaller event, we hope to establish an atmosphere that stimulates discussion and knowledge sharing. We welcome submissions covering various aspects of social stratification in science but will prioritise research with an explicit ‘elite’ focus.

The symposium will feature two keynote speeches and presentations of 16 abstracts. Selected abstracts will be published with a DOI on Zenodo. They should be at most 1,200 words. We welcome research-in-progress papers. We aim for 30-40 participants to facilitate a forum for the free exchange of ideas.

To submit your paper, please send it by email to Jens Peter Andersen (jpa@ps.au.dk). Deadline: June 16