About

Charles Gomez is a faculty member in the Program in Applied Mathematics at the University of Arizona. His research areas of interest include computational and mathematical sociology, with a focus on studying the rising inequality in global scientific knowledge production and diffusion. He is engaged in exploring how scientific information spreads and how inequalities develop within the global scientific community, contributing to the understanding of social dynamics in scientific knowledge dissemination.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Computer Science
• Data science
• Economics
• Law
• Regional science
• Knowledge management
• Political economy
• Economic geography
• Geography
• Economic growth
• Mathematics
• Library science
• Development economics

Selected publications

• Replication Data for: The Mimetic Trap: Concentrated Influence Homogenizes Global Science

  Harvard Dataverse · 2026-01-20

  datasetOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Data and scripts for the project, The Mimetic Trap: Concentrated Influence Homogenizes Global Science.

  PublisherDOI

• Hedgehogs, foxes, and global science ecosystems: Decoding universities' research profiles across fields with nested ecological networks

  Research Policy · 2024-06-08 · 5 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Modern scientific research evokes ecological imagery and metaphors, given that it is global, interdependent, and diverse. Ecological network structures—like matrices of species inhabiting islands across an archipelago—can be reordered to form nested patterns. These patterns describe the overall health of ecosystems, place species on a spectrum between being described as generalists (foxes) or specialists (hedgehogs), and which of these interactions might appear or disappear. Using the number of citations universities receive for work published in a particular subfield taken from over 66 million scientific publications in OpenAlex, we construct and analyze yearly nested ecological networks of a dozen academic fields between 1990 and 2017. We find increasingly nested structures across fields infer future acknowledgment in different subfields. We argue that this framework can inform policy on scientific research and university funding and evaluation. • We model global research in 12 fields as nested ecological networks, with universities as species and subfields as their inhabited sites. • Using citations from over 66M papers in OpenAlex (1990-2017), we measure yearly nested structures and university entropy. • Entropy in networks shows prominent universities as fox-like (many subfields) and others as hedgehog-like (few subfields). • Nested structures in networks predict universities' future research capacities, potentially guiding research and funding policies.

  PublisherDOI

• Attachment preferences in diverse collective problem-solving networks and systemic performance

  Journal of Mathematical Sociology · 2024-11-22

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Collective problem-solving networks are common in modern life. They often benefit from having diverse members with complementary skills and perspectives, but this may be squandered if they self-select away from diverse counterparts and toward homogeneous groups or perceived competency. Building on the extensive tradition of “exploration-and-exploitation” agent-based modeling, we simulate communicative networks populated with diverse groups of agents tasked with solving complex problems. We compare diversity-seeking networks, where agents prefer ties to dissimilar agents, homophily-seeking networks, where agents prefer ties to similar agents, and merit-seeking networks, where agents prefer ties to agents who have found better solutions. We find that diversity-seeking networks perform well because diversity promotes more exploration for solutions and fosters network structures that more effectively disseminate them.

  PublisherDOI

• Developing a Text‐Based Measure of Humility in Inquiry Using Computational Grounded Theory

  Proceedings of the Association for Information Science and Technology · 2024-10-01

  articleOpen access

  ABSTRACT We describe a project in which we develop a text‐based measure of HI in the context of scholarly communication using corpora of scientific publications. The data and analytic approach we use will circumvent known concerns with self‐reported data on humility levels and will be calculable on a large scale. We use a computational grounded theory approach to develop a text‐based measure of HI. We draw from an annotated corpus of scientific articles in economics, psychology, and sociology (2010–2023), generating three supra‐dimensions of HI (Epistemic, Rhetorical, and Transparent) and several novel sub‐codes of HI. We present our initial analysis with a focus on the three dimensions of HI derived from a computational grounded theory approach. The text‐based measure helps us better understand how contextual factors shape HI and contribute to mixed methods in information science research.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Replication Data for: The Growing Concentration of National Influence in Global Science and its Impact on Future Research.

  Harvard Dataverse · 2023-01-30

  datasetOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Scientific influence, or the capacity of ideas and concepts to shape future research, is crucial to developing and disseminating knowledge and sustained innovation. Using nearly 240 million scientific works published between 1990 and 2023 from OpenAlex to construct international networks of influence, I demonstrate that discursive influence, which represents what global scientific communities consider important and worthy of investigation, is disproportionately and increasingly concentrated in a small group of resource-wealthy countries, including the United States, Canada, Western Europe, and East Asia, in comparison to attributional influence. This concentration raises issues of equity and innovation in global scientific discourse, perhaps narrowing research perspectives, exacerbating biases, and creating echo chambers that are associated with stifling innovation and marginalizing contributions from countries that are peripheral to global scientific discourse. The findings underscore the need for policies that ensure diverse and inclusive global research enterprises.

  PublisherDOI

• The Growing Concentration of National Influence in Global Science and Its Impact on Future Research.

  2023-01-30

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  A small group of prominent countries is disproportionately and increasingly influencing scientific discourses. Concentrated influence in science could stifle sustained innovation and exclude researchers in countries often relegated to the periphery of global science. To demonstrate the imbalance of national influence, I focus on a field’s concepts and ideas that originate from researchers in one country and are then used by researchers in other countries. Text is the best medium where these scientific concepts and ideas reside as terms that can be extracted at scale. I construct yearly international networks of term-based knowledge diffusion between the years 1990 and 2012 for 165 academic fields based on nearly a quarter million sets of scientific terms. I use 30 million scientific papers published from two metadata repositories of scientific publications, OpenAlex and Semantic Scholar Academic Graph. I measure misalignments between these diffusion networks and their corresponding citation networks that reflect the recognition of international influence. I find that both are consistently and strongly aligned. However, it is where knowledge originally diffuses from that reveals a growing and concentrated imbalance in national influence, in particular from the United States.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Science Wars

  Contexts · 2023-05-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Charles J. Gomez on The Quantified Scholar and Study Gods.

  PublisherDOI

• Hedgehogs, Foxes, and the Global Science Ecosystem: Decoding Universities’ Research Profiles across Fields with Nested Ecological Networks.

  2022-04-16

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Modern scientific research evokes ecological imagery and metaphors, given that it is global, interdependent, and diverse. Ecological network structures—like matrices of species inhabiting islands across an archipelago—can be reordered to form nested patterns. These patterns describe the overall health of ecosystems, place species on a spectrum between being described as generalists (foxes) or specialists (hedgehogs), and which of these interactions might appear or disappear. Using the number of citations universities receive for work published in a particular subfield taken from over 20 million scientific publications in OpenAlex, we construct and analyze yearly nested ecological networks of a dozen academic fields between 1990 to 2017. We find increasingly nested structures across fields, indicating a robust global research ecology that also infers future acknowledgment in different subfields. We argue that this framework can inform policy on scientific research and university funding and evaluation.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Leading countries in global science increasingly receive more citations than other countries doing similar research

  Nature Human Behaviour · 2022 · 179 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Computer Science
  • Regional science

  Citations and text analysis are both used to study the distribution and flow of ideas between researchers, fields and countries, but the resulting flows are rarely equal. We argue that the differences in these two flows capture a growing global inequality in the production of scientific knowledge. We offer a framework called 'citational lensing' to identify where citations should appear between countries but are absent given that what is embedded in their published abstract texts is highly similar. This framework also identifies where citations are overabundant given lower similarity. Our data come from nearly 20 million papers across nearly 35 years and 150 fields from the Microsoft Academic Graph. We find that scientific communities increasingly centre research from highly active countries while overlooking work from peripheral countries. This inequality is likely to pose substantial challenges to the growth of novel ideas.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Replication Data for: Leading countries in global science increasingly receive more citations than other countries doing similar research.

  Harvard Dataverse · 2022-02-20

  datasetOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Code and metadata for the paper published in Nature Human Behaviour (https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-022-01351-5): Leading countries in global science increasingly receive more citations than other countries doing similar research. Before downloading code and running scripts, first read the 00_ReadMe.txt file that outlines the data and scripts needed to replicate the results in the paper and in the supplemental information (SI) section.

  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• Inequality in Global Scientific Research: Implications for Novelty and Innovation

  NSF · $254k · 2020–2023

Frequent coauthors

• Ricardo Hausmann

  Santa Fe Institute

  6 shared

• Antonio Sirianni

  Georgetown University

  5 shared

• César A. Hidalgo

  Université Toulouse-I-Capitole

  4 shared

• Jeremy N. Bailenson

  Stanford University

  3 shared

• David Lazer

  Northeastern University

  3 shared

• César A. Hidalgo

  3 shared

• Paolo Parigi

  Stanford University

  3 shared

• Sebastián Bustos

  3 shared

Education

• Ph.D.

  Stanford University

  2016

• M.P.P., Harvard Kennedy School

  Harvard University

  2010

• M.S., Applied Physics

  Columbia University

  2006

• B.S.E.

  Duke University

  2005