Recent years have witnessed increased interests in measuring authority and modelling influence in social networks. For a long time, PageRank has been widely used for authority computation and has also been adopted as a solid baseline for evaluating social influence related applications. However, the connection between authority measurement and influence modelling is not clearly established. To ...

Relying on a powerful collective narrative through which political, legal and social decision-making is guided in the name of science, the authority of scientific experts reaches beyond the boundaries of their certified knowledge base. Therefore, expertise constitutes and is constituted by transgressive competence. The author argues that (1) changes in the decisionmaking structure of liberal We...

INTRODUCTION The World Health Organization (WHO) is widely regarded as the preeminent international authority on health and scientific matters. Its information mandate is a powerful one, for it enables the WHO to construct issues as legitimate ones for concern that should be addressed in particular ways. METHODS Intensive interviewing of WHO staff was used to elicit writing and editing proces...

We compare astronomers' removal of Pluto from the listing of planets and psychiatrists' removal of homosexuality from the listing of mental disorders. Although the political maneuverings that emerged in both controversies are less than scientifically ideal, we argue that competition for "scientific authority" among competing groups is a normal part of scientific progress. In both cases, a compl...