arXiv subjects

Gavin Cook

Publications and source records attributed to Gavin Cook.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Towards a Sociology of Sociology: Inequality, Elitism, and Prestige in the Sociological Enterprise From 1970 to the Present

There is a science of science and an informal economics of economics, but there is not a cohesive sociology of sociology. We turn the central findings and theoretical lenses of the sociological tradition and the sociological study of stratification inward on sociology itself to investigate how sociology has changed since the 1970s. We link two bibliometric databases to trace diachronic relationships between PhD training and publication outcomes, both of which are understudied in the science of science and sociology of science. All of sociology's top 3 journals remained biased against alum of less prestigious PhD programs, and while most forms of bias in elite sociological publishing have ameliorated over time, the house bias of the American Journal of Sociology in favor PhD alumnae of UChicago has intensified.

physics.soc-ph↗

arXiv2026

Bimodal Bias against Chinese Scientists in the American Academy: Penalties for Men, Bonuses for Women

Given the recent targeting of Chinese scientists by the Department of Justice and sizable contributions of Chinese scientists to American science, it is urgent to investigate the presence and the particulars of anti-Chinese discrimination in the American academy. Across a sample of all faculty in the top 100 departments of sociology, economics, chemistry, and physics in the United States, we show that female Chinese scientists comprise a much higher percentage of the female professoriate than male Chinese scientists in the male professoriate. Using an exact matching approach, we then find that male Chinese scientists suffer from a dramatic citation penalty but that female Chinese scientists enjoy a persistent citation bonus. On average, female Chinese scientists require fewer citations on average than non-Chinese women where male Chinese scientists require more citations than their non-Chinese counterparts to attain a tenure-track professorial job of a given prestige rating.

econ.GN↗

arXiv2021

How COVID-19 has Impacted American Attitudes Toward China: A Study on Twitter

Past research has studied social determinants of attitudes toward foreign countries. Confounded by potential endogeneity biases due to unobserved factors or reverse causality, the causal impact of these factors on public opinion is usually difficult to establish. Using social media data, we leverage the suddenness of the COVID-19 pandemic to examine whether a major global event has causally changed American views of another country. We collate a database of more than 297 million posts on the social media platform Twitter about China or COVID-19 up to June 2020, and we treat tweeting about COVID-19 as a proxy for individual awareness of COVID-19. Using regression discontinuity and difference-in-difference estimation, we find that awareness of COVID-19 causes a sharp rise in anti-China attitudes. Our work has implications for understanding how self-interest affects policy preference and how Americans view migrant communities.

cs.SI↗

arXiv2020

Large-scale Quantitative Evidence of Media Impact on Public Opinion toward China

Do mass media influence people's opinion of other countries? Using BERT, a deep neural network-based natural language processing model, we analyze a large corpus of 267,907 China-related articles published by The New York Times since 1970. We then compare our output from The New York Times to a longitudinal data set constructed from 101 cross-sectional surveys of the American public's views on China. We find that the reporting of The New York Times on China in one year explains 54% of the variance in American public opinion on China in the next. Our result confirms hypothesized links between media and public opinion and helps shed light on how mass media can influence public opinion of foreign countries.

cs.CL↗