Hyunuk Kim, Ph.D.

Hyunuk Kim, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor of Business Analytics & Director of the Center for Applied Analytics and AI

Publications

You can also find my articles on my Google Scholar profile.

Journal Articles

Measuring the disruptiveness of conceptual papers in the field of marketing

Published in Journal of Marketing Analytics, 2026

Marketing scholars have underscored the importance of conceptual articles in providing theoretical foundations and new perspectives to the field. This paper supports the argument by employing two network-based measures—citation counts and disruption scores—and comparing them for conceptual and empirical research. With the aid of a large language model, we classify conceptual and empirical articles published in a substantial set of marketing journals. The findings reveal that conceptual research is not only more frequently cited but also has a greater disruptive impact on the field of marketing than empirical research. Our paper contributes to the understanding of how marketing articles advance knowledge through developmental approaches.

Link to the paper

Global mobility of the recent STEM postdoctoral workforce registered in ORCID

Published in Quantitative Science Studies, 2025

Postdoctoral researchers contribute to scientific, technological, and societal innovations under the supervision of academic faculty and domain experts. Their international movements facilitate the advancement and diffusion of knowledge and thus are important for research and development. To understand postdoctoral mobility at a global scale, this paper analyzes self-reported career trajectories of postdoctoral researchers by leveraging Open Researcher and Contributor ID (ORCID), focusing on five STEM fields: Biological Sciences, Biomedical and Clinical Sciences, Chemical Sciences, Engineering, and Physical Sciences. The United States and European countries are major destinations for the first postdoctoral position across the selected fields, and three Asian countries—China, Japan, and the Republic of Korea—also attract postdoctoral researchers in Chemical Sciences and Engineering. Gender differences are observed for some specific cases mainly due to the tendency that female postdoctoral researchers are more likely to stay in a single country or less likely to move to the United States for the second postdoctoral position compared to male postdoctoral researchers. The results would be leveraged to design science and technology policies for postdoctoral researchers in consideration of additional factors, such as culture and language.

Link to the paper

Wallets’ explorations across non-fungible token collections

Published in Scientific Reports, 2024

Non-fungible tokens (NFTs), which are immutable and transferable tokens on blockchain networks, have been used to certify the ownership of digital images often grouped in collections. Depending on individual interests, wallets explore and purchase NFTs in one or more image collections. Among many potential factors of shaping purchase trajectories, this paper specifically examines how visual similarities between collections affect wallets’ explorations. Our model characterizes each wallet’s explorations with a Lévy flight and shows that wallets tend to favor collections having similar visual features to their previous purchases while their behaviors vary widely. The model also predicts the extent to which the next collection is close to the most recent collection of purchases with respect to visual features. These results are expected to enhance and support recommendation systems for the NFT market.

Link to the paper

Understanding the Consumption of Antimicrobial Resistance–Related Content on Social Media: Twitter Analysis

Published in Journal of Medical Internet Research, 2023

The aim of this study is to better understand how AMR-related content is consumed on the social media platform Twitter and to understand some of the drivers of engagement. This is essential to designing effective public health strategies, raising awareness about antimicrobial stewardship, and enabling academics to effectively promote their research on social media. Our finding suggests that specific pathogens gain more attention on Twitter than others and that the levels of attention do not necessarily correspond to their status on the WHO priority pathogen list. This suggests that more targeted public health strategies may be needed to raise awareness about AMR among specific pathogens. Analysis of follower data suggests that in the busy schedules of health care professionals, social media offers a fast and accessible gateway to staying abreast of the latest developments in this field.

Link to the paper

COVID-19 confines recreational gatherings in Seoul to familiar, less crowded, and neighboring urban areas

Published in Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 2022

Recreational gatherings are sources of the spread of infectious diseases. Understanding the dynamics of recreational gatherings is essential to building effective public health policies but challenging as the interaction between people and recreational places is complex. Recreational activities are concentrated in a set of urban areas and establish a recreational hierarchy. In this hierarchy, higher-level regions attract more people than lower-level regions for recreational purposes. Here, using customers’ motel booking records which are highly associated with recreational activities in Korea, we identify that recreational hierarchy, geographical distance, and attachment to a location are crucial factors of recreational gatherings in Seoul, Republic of Korea. Our analyses show that after the COVID-19 outbreak, people are more likely to visit familiar recreational places, avoid the highest level of the recreational hierarchy, and travel close distances. Interestingly, the recreational visitations were reduced not only in the highest but also in low-level regions. Urban areas at low levels of the recreational hierarchy were more severely affected by COVID-19 than urban areas at high and middle levels of the recreational hierarchy.

Link to the paper

Leveraging volunteer fact checking to identify misinformation about COVID-19 in social media

Published in Harvard Kennedy School Misinformation Review, 2020

Identifying emerging health misinformation is a challenge because its manner and type are often unknown. However, many social media users correct misinformation when they encounter it. From this intuition, we implemented a strategy that detects emerging health misinformation by tracking replies that seem to provide accurate information. This strategy is more efficient than keyword-based search in identifying COVID-19 misinformation about antibiotics and a cure. It also reveals the extent to which misinformation has spread on social networks.

Link to the paper

Horizon scanning in policy research database with a probabilistic topic model

Published in Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 2019

National governments take advantage of collective intelligence when conducting foresight processes. They grasp emerging issues through expert reviews as well as public opinions. It raises national agendas and affects policy-making process. Therefore, by examining policy papers which contain societal issues, we can perceive past, current, and future environments. In this study, we exploit policy research database of Republic of Korea, which is a unique source that automatically collects all policy papers written by national research institutes, to extract latent topics and their trends over 10 years through a probabilistic topic model. Detected topics fairly correspond to expert-selected future drivers in national foresight report, implying that public discourse and policy agenda are coupled. We suggest to utilize open government data and text mining methods for building open foresight framework that various actors exchange their opinions on societal issues.

Link to the paper

Measuring national capability over big science’s multidisciplinarity: A case study of nuclear fusion research

Published in PLOS ONE, 2019

In the era of big science, countries allocate big research and development budgets to large scientific facilities that boost collaboration and research capability. A nuclear fusion device called the “tokamak” is a source of great interest for many countries because it ideally generates sustainable energy expected to solve the energy crisis in the future. Here, to explore the scientific effects of tokamaks, we map a country’s research capability in nuclear fusion research with normalized revealed comparative advantage on five topical clusters—material, plasma, device, diagnostics, and simulation—detected through a dynamic topic model. Our approach captures not only the growth of China, India, and the Republic of Korea but also the decline of Canada, Japan, Sweden, and the Netherlands. Time points of their rise and fall are related to tokamak operation, highlighting the importance of large facilities in big science. The gravity model points out that two countries collaborate less in device, diagnostics, and plasma research if they have comparative advantages in different topics. This relation is a unique feature of nuclear fusion compared to other science fields. Our results can be used and extended when building national policies for big science.

Link to the paper

Does Pitch Type-Zone Uncertainty Matter to a Pitcher’s Performance?

Published in New Physics: Sae Mulli, 2018

Baseball is a game of numbers. Large-scale baseball data have been utilized in decision making process by team managers. Recent studies with PITCHf/x, a system that tracks every pitch, provide new insights on the role of the pitch-type sequence in the pitcher’s performance. These studies are based on the assumption that the pitch-type uncertainty puts the hitter at a disadvantage. However, the pitch-zone uncertainty, another factor of pitching uncertainty, is neglected in many cases. Here, we introduce normalized mutual information for pitch type and pitch-zone as an indicator of pitching uncertainty. A pitcher with less of a repertoire with respect to type-zone combination has high normalized mutual information in pitching. We calculate the pitch type- zone uncertainties for major league baseball starting pitchers and compare the results with field independent pitching, a metric of pitcher’s performance. Our analysis shows that normalized mutual information is uncorrelated with performance in nine distinct subgroups extracted from revealed comparative advantage in pitch type. This result underlines the importance of the pitcher’s repertoire and ability to be competitive in professional baseball.

Link to the paper

Embracing networks of national policy research in future foresight

Published in International Journal of Knowledge-Based Development, 2016

Policy research on social issues usually has been led by the national government. Policy research reflects national interests in the present as well as in the future. In this paper, we examine a possibility to apply network analysis of national policy research in future foresight. Network analysis is conducted based on the bibliometric data retrieved from the National Knowledge Information System (NKIS) of Korea which helps public to find national research papers with ease. We classify these issues into three categories (national security, economy, and social problem), and calculated centrality measures to detect important social issues and keywords. Keywords with high betweenness centrality show detailed social trends in Korea.

Link to the paper

Bibliometric analysis of collaboration network and the role of research station in Antarctic science

Published in Industrial Engineering & Management Systems, 2016

Due to the large scale of Antarctic science, scientific collaboration is required for conducting scientific research. In this study, we attempted to investigate collaboration network and the role of research station in Antarctic science based on bibliometric data from 1995 to 2014. We confirmed that geographical proximity tends to be important for scientific collaboration by employing community detection in the network. This result raises the question about what the role of research station in Antarctica is. We tried to reveal its role by focusing on five countries, Belgium, China, Czech Republic, India, and Korea that constructed new research stations during the last decade. Relative growth rate, a value to measure the growth of publications, didn’t differ much around the construction period compared to those in other periods for these countries except Belgium. However, we found geographical keywords emerged around the construction for all five countries. These keywords were utilized to observe national research activities in Antarctica. They show where countries started to be concerned about after the construction

Link to the paper

Conference Papers

Measuring the disruptiveness of conceptual papers in the field of marketing

Published in WWW 22: Companion Proceedings, 2022

Citation count is a popular index for assessing scientific papers. However, it depends on not only the quality of a paper but also various factors, such as conventionality, journal, team size, career age, and gender. Here, we examine the extent to which the conventionality of a paper is related to its citation count by using our measure, topic disparity. The topic disparity is the cosine distance between a paper and its discipline on a neural embedding space. Using this measure, we show that the topic disparity is negatively associated with citation count, even after controlling journal impact, team size, and the career age and gender of the first and last authors. This result indicates that less conventional research tends to receive fewer citations than conventional research. The topic disparity can be used to complement citation count and to recommend papers at the periphery of a discipline because of their less conventional topics.

Link to the paper