Statistics of Physicists--the Many-body Effect of the Society

Similar to the many-body effect of condensed matter physics, assembling a group of scientists will lead to emergent new social phenomena even if they are weakly interacting. In this colloquium, I will provide an overview of my short journey into scientometrics, a field dedicated to the quantitative study of science and science policy, and share interesting results of its discoveries. For example, how can we effectively measure a scientist's performance? Are there better ways to allocate resources? What factors contribute to variations in scientific performance among different countries? In addition, the rise of China has profoundly influenced the global research landscape over the past three decades, resulting in significantly heightened global competition. On the other hand, I will also show our unexpected findings that the contributions of millions of immigrant Chinese scholars do not correlate with the net publication growth of their host countries. At the same time, there are distortions in publication criteria, and citations are distributed anomalously. How do we understand these anomalies? I will show how we use simple models and statistics to explain them.