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

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.

X thread 1; X thread 2

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

X thread; Bluesky thread

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.

X thread

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

Measuring Vogue in American Sociology (2011-2020) [Preprint]

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

TL; DR: Through semantic network dynamics, we track the rise of popular ideas (vogue) in American sociology, along with their producers and adopters.

Oral presentations at ICSSI (Intl. Conf. on Science of Science and Innovation) 2024 and IC2S2 (Intl. Conf. for Computational Social Science) 2024.