Attila Varga

Senior Research Fellow | Institute of Social and Political Sciences
Senior Research Fellow | ANETI Lab at Corvinus University of Budapest

BIO

I am a Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Sociology at Corvinus University, and an affiliated member of the ANTEI Lab at the Corvinus Institute of Advanced Studies.

My research examines how the organization of knowledge, along with social and communication networks, shapes scientific careers and technological development within firms. I have developed novel measures of author and paper similarity, as well as indicators of technological novelty, to better understand the dynamics of knowledge production. My current research focuses on the methodological limitations of author name disambiguation, the use of bibliometric data to trace scientist migration, and the factors underlying the persistent growth in team sizes within the sciences.

I teach social science theory in the Social Data Science Master’s program at Corvinus University, and I have previously taught courses on quantitative research methods. My work has appeared in journals including Quantitative Science Studies, PNAS, and Scientometrics. I hold a PhD in Sociology from the University of Arizona and have held a postdoctoral research position at Indiana University.

PUBLICATIONS

A Varga, S Kojaku, F N Silva (2025) Measuring research interest similarity with transition probabilities. Quantitative Science Studies, 6: 922–939.
A Varga (2022) The Narrowing of Literature Use and the Restricted Mobility of Papers in the Sciences. PNAS, 119(17): e2117488119.
A Varga (2019) Shorter Distances between Papers over Time are Due to More Cross-Field References and Increased Citation Rate to Higher Impact Papers. PNAS, (116)44: 22094-22099.
A Varga (2018) Novelty and Foreseeing Research Trends; The Case of Astrophysics and Astronomy. The Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series, (236)21: 15.
B Lengyel, A Varga, B Ságvári, Á Jakobi, J Kertész (2015) Geographies of an online social network. PLoS One, 10(9): 0137248.
A Varga (2015) Changes of Personal Network Composition and Inter-Group Ties from 1987 to 2005 in Hungary. Belvedere, 24(4): 131-134.
A Varga, A Nemeslaki (2012) Do organizational network studies constitute a cohesive communicative field? Mapping the citation context of organizational network research. The Journal of Sociology and Social Anthropology, 15(5): 348-363.
A Varga (2011) Measuring the Semantic Integrity of Scientific Fields: a Method and a Case Study of Sociology. Scientometrics, 88(1): 163-177.