The Friendship Paradox in the formation of academic committees

Abstract

The Friendship Paradox is a phenomenon which states that most people have fewer friends than their own friends, and its generalization has been proposed in the last three decades by several scientific papers. Our study is focused on the academic environment, and seeks to determine whether or not the impression that individuals may have concerning invitations to take part in oral defenses is justifiable. This involved testing two hypotheses with regard to academic committee members: “The Invitee Paradox” (in terms of the person who is invited); and “The Inviter Paradox” (in terms of the person who extends the invitation). The paradoxes were assessed by designing invitation networks, both weighted and unweighted, which represent a dual relationship in which an invitation originates from an “inviter” and is extended to an “invitee”. We then tested the hypotheses with the aid of two real-world open access datasets from online academic repositories: (1) American (Brazilian Capes Catalog); and (2) European (French STAR Deposit). Our results showed that only “The Invitee Paradox” was true. We also explored possible relations between our proposed measurement of the invitation paradoxes and the PageRank metric, as to evaluate the relative importance of members in the invitation networks.