Where there's a will there's a way: ChatGPT is used more for science in countries where it is prohibited [Paper]

Quantitative Science Studies, 2025

Honglin Bao, Mengyi Sun, Misha Teplitskiy

TL; DR: After its release, ChatGPT was used for science more by countries where it was prohibited, with little evidence of its association with research quality.

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Presented at Harvard D^3 Institute research workshop 2024.

From division to unity: A large-scale study on the emergence of Computational Social Science, 1990–2021 [Preprint]

TheWebConf/WWW 2025

Honglin Bao, Jiawei Zhang, Mingxuan Cao, James Evans

TL; DR: We conducted the largest quantitive examination (on ~11 million papers) of how computational social science (CSS) emerges from— and transforms — the social sciences, and uncovered a division-to-unity pattern.

Interactive demo for CSS evolution using transformer embeddings

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A simulation-based analysis of the impact of rhetorical citations in science [Paper]

Nature Communications, 2024

Honglin Bao, Misha Teplitskiy

TL; DR: Using a counterfactual simulation, we find "bad" citing without intellectual influence reduces the reproduction of inequality in science.

Featured in Nature's Computational Social Science Collection; Selected media coverage “Swarm Agents Club 集智俱乐部”; X thread

Code and data

Presented at Computational Organization Modeling Society Brown Bag Seminar 2023 and Harvard D^3 Institute research workshop 2022. Slides

Cultural Ties in American Sociology [Preprint]

Revise & Resubmit, Poetics ("field top" in cultural sociology)

Alex Xiaoqin Yan, Honglin Bao, Tom R. Leppard, Andrew P. Davis

TL; DR: Status and geo-location shape "cultural ties" and the formation of schools of thought in American sociology.

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Presented at ASA (Meeting of the American Sociological Association) Science Knowledge and Technology Section 2023, Harvard D^3 Institute research workshop 2023, and NC State Structures, Identities, and Society Seminar 2023. Slides