Honglin (虹霖) Bao

Innovation, Knowledge, and AI


Doctoral student in data science, University of Chicago

Contact: honglinbao at uchicago dot edu

Hi there! I am Honglin (he/him). I am a computational social scientist and data science doctoral student in the UChicago Knowledge Lab working with James A. Evans. My overall research vision is to harness big data and AI to make sense of innovation and accelerate it in science and technology for the betterment of society.

My works appear in top peer-reviewed journals and proceedings across computer science, network science, and social sciences including Nature Communications.

I have backgrounds in mathematics, computer science, social science, and evolutionary biology. Before Chicago I graduated from Michigan State and was a research associate at Harvard Business School (Organizations and Management). I am from China where I volunteered for LGBTQ health for years. I like sports and my most recent bench press was 185 lbs.

I widely and closely collaborate with innovation scholars outside Chicago. Drop me an email if you are interested in working together!

Selected Papers

I advertise the papers I think a lot about through my X highlights.

AI & Scientific Innovation


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

Honglin Bao=, Mengyi Sun=, Misha Teplitskiy

TL; DR: Restricting ChatGPT geographically is ineffective in science, yet ChatGPT's impact on improving research quality remains limited.

X thread 1; X thread 2

Presented at Harvard D^3 Institute research workshop 2024.

Innovation Diffusion


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

Evaluation of Innovation


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

Selected Work in Progress

Honglin Bao, Kai Li. Cometh the hour, cometh the hero: How new publishing venues exacerbate inequality in science.

Honglin Bao, Mengyi Sun, Misha Teplitskiy. Credibility in Science

Alex Xiaoqin Yan=, Honglin Bao=, Tom R. Leppard, Andrew P. Davis. "Vogue" in American Sociology. 

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